


i'm not the queen of the dead (don’t call this the end) – city to city (the radio edit)

by Chronolith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura (Voltron) Lives, Canonical Character Death, Depression, Fragmented Narrative, Grief/Mourning, Languages and Linguistics, Magic, Multi, Post-Canon Fix-It, Swearing, Worldbuilding, but she gets better, the story of relationships built in the gaps, warning for Lance’s mouth basically
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 10:16:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19721647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;I will show you fear in a handful of dust.~T.S. Eliot, 1922On the ninth day she rose from the dead.





	i'm not the queen of the dead (don’t call this the end) – city to city (the radio edit)

**Author's Note:**

> have a [ playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5vDTS2f68QbF8H9ixG9E6g?si=d-4JQFoVQQebwVXbzVRgzQ) to go with the fic.

On the ninth day she rose from the dead. 

Walked out of the rift like a queen walking off a battlefield with her head held high and her hair like a cloak of silver behind her and in her wake rose the exultation of the masses like the choir of angels heralding her return.

Or at least that’s what Lance’d like to say had happened on the ninth day after the armistice treaty had been signed. But no. The universe is neither kind nor aware of the literary tropes of the romantic kind—think poets with more emotion than sense, not his abuela’s favorite telenovelas though if pushed he’d even take those tropes because at the end of the day the dead come _back_ in his abuela’s soaps if the television audience loves them enough and no one has ever been adored quite the way that Allura had been adored—and so Allura does not come back from the dead like a conquering queen no matter how much Lance cries and cries and _cries_. No. That is, of course, not at all what happens. What happens is Takashi Shirogane, the man voted three times over most likely to know what the fuck he is doing, loses his entire godsdamned mind and announces that he’s engaged. 

What the shit.

* * *

“What the shit,” Lance says, not asks, because this is not a question. It is a statement of utter disbelief with this bullfuckery.

Pidge and Hunk elbow him in the sides with such perfect synchronicity he’s amazed that they aren’t the ones announcing their engagement. It’d make more sense. He ignores them in favor of treating Shiro to the flattest glare he can manage. Exhaustion haunts his every step, lives like ghosts his expressions, but he can still manage to glare, flat and annoyed. 

Shiro tilts his chin up in that way that says that he’s prepared to double down on his decision and damn the consequences. 

“We’re in love,” Shiro says with aching sincerity.

Lance is grateful that Keith isn’t in the room because he really doesn’t need to know what it looks like when someone bleeds out from having their metaphorical heart ripped out from their metaphorical ribs. Blood and viscera everywhere. Send your thoughts and prayers up to the heavens for one Keith Kogane because he’s probably now dying of a wound no one can see to stitch. 

And besides. 

If Lance wants to see the face of the metaphorically wounded, he can always look in a fucking mirror. 

Shiro soldiers on like he isn’t aware of any of that and maybe he isn’t because there’s no one so blind as those blinkered by their own grief, festering sense of responsibility, and rage at a universe that fails to respect even the most basic of tropes. (Like, you know, the trope that says that the heroes of the war get to be fucking _happy_ afterward.) Shiro’s always been good at ignoring his own pain—real or metaphorical, the number of times Lance’s watched Keith dash to catch Shiro after a battle as Shiro topples over due to one hidden injury or another is a ticker counter that’s climbed so high he really doesn’t want to look at it (Jesus, _Keith_ )—in favor of doing whatever it is Shiro thinks needs to be done for someone else. 

Apparently, even if that someone is dead.

“Curtis isn’t Adam,” Lance says. He can feel Hunk and Pidge stiffen even as all the colour drains from Shiro’s face. And, yep, hit that target like a bullseye from a hundred yards. “Marrying Curtis won’t retroactively resolve that fight.”

Hunk hisses something under his breath that Lance ignores. This needs to be said and he’s pretty sure he’s the only one in the room who can say it. If anyone can talk about being haunted by their dead, Lance can. He’s got the shiny blue facial markings to prove it.

Shiro squares his shoulders like he’s been punched before looking Lance dead in the eye and saying with quiet dignity: “I know that.”

So. Shiro can look him straight in the face and lie without blinking. That’s good to know.

“Do you?” Lance says with all the scorching disbelief he can muster. He maybe borrows the tone from his older sister because no one does blistering skepticism like Veronica. “Because from where I’m standing this is some primetime displacement bullshit going on.”

“ _Lance_ ,” Pidge hisses like she’s scandalized, only Lance knows what she keeps on her hard drive and no girl who is into porn like that can be scandalized by anything short of spiking the little baby Jesus on short javelin and lobbing the entire unholy mess right over the city walls of the faithful.

There’s a half moment where Shiro looks like he’s seriously considering decking Lance, which would be interesting and probably the healthiest damned response Lance can hope for in the present circumstances, but Shiro pulls it all back inside whatever iron lockbox that he keeps all his emotions. 

“Well,” Shiro says slowly as if he’s measuring out the words, looking for the most reasonable ones that aren’t gonna to start a screaming match. More fool he because Lance is absolutely gonna drag this shit right into screaming daytime talk show drama where it fucking belongs. “You are wrong.”

“The fuck I am,” Lance snaps. Shiro’s eyebrows beetle down into a disapproving glower. He never did like having people argue with him, much less _Lance_ , who he still tends to regard as this obnoxious kid he’s somehow been saddled with against his will. Lance sneers at him. “Marrying Curtis and running off to go play house isn’t going to—” Lance pauses to wave his hands through the air like he can physically manifest Shiro’s rationale with the gesture. “I don’t know even know what the fuck you think it’s going to do. Honestly. I am at a fucking loss. Appease Adam’s ghost?”

Shiro flinches at that. A full body jerk like he’s been shot. Eyes wide, breath shallowing down into something like a pained gasp, a fine tremble to his hands. 

Lance stares at him while Hunk claps a hand on Lance’s leg and squeezes so hard Lance can feel everything south of his knee start to tingle from the blood loss.

“Holy fuck,” Lance breathes, “you dumb bastard. That’s it, isn’t it?”

The way Shiro refuses to look at him. Stays silent with his head down like he’s taken a sucker punch that leaves him reeling like a boxer on the mat with a countdown approaching ten. Can’t say anything in his defense like his ghosts have a stranglehold on his vocal cords. All these things put together tell Lance he’s right, he’s right, he’s right. And Takashi Shirogane is the biggest self-destructive asshole Lance has ever had the misfortune of watching implode in slow motion.

“ _Lance_ ,” Pidge hisses again, like it’d work any better the second time around.

He bats her away without looking at her. Shiro finally meets his flat stare. Lance doesn’t know what Shiro sees in his face, but it seems to captivate him like a mouse staring down a cobra.

“You know this isn’t going to work,” Lance says carefully. His leg has gone numb from Hunk squeezing it and Pidge is hissing inchoate threats furiously into his ear that he refuses to listen to. There’s something terrible clawing behind his ribs where his heart used to live. A sick, feral scream of rage and pain. It makes its way out his mouth as a breathless, gasping statement as if all the hurt living tucked up to his breastbone can come tumbling out as words sharp as knives. “You _know_ it.”

Shiro looks back at him, regal in the depths of his pointless self-sacrifice upon the alter of his misplaced guilt. “It’s not like that.”

“You can’t give the dead the lives that they’d wanted retroactively. Via a, a, fuckin’ proxy,” Lance says, and he doesn’t really know which one of them he’s telling it to—himself or Shiro—because they both flinch. 

Shiro doesn’t answer. Just shakes his head no, no, no. As if he can physically reject what he’s hearing even if he can’t put that rejection into words. There’s a shattered quality to Shiro’s expression. A brokenness that lingers in the shadows of his eyes. His grief is overwhelming, but Lance knows that grief because he’s got its twin carved into the spaces between his ribs and he is an absence of sympathy.

“You can’t give the dead anything,” Lance says so softly it could be mistaken for gentleness. “ _They’re dead._ ”

* * *

They don’t talk after that. Him and Shiro. Not face to face. Not on video conferencing. Not with a carrying Pidge(on). They do not talk, Sam-i-am. 

Not in a house, not with a mouse, they do not fucking talk.

In retrospect, this is where the breakdown becomes evident to outside observers. Not where it _starts_. Oh no. It’d started months and months ago when they’d all watched Allura go quiet and tired and cold and did fucking nothing because how the fuck could you even touch a grief that enormous, a burning rage that encompassing? How do you—

When she looks at you and says—

_How—_

So. No. This new cold war is not where the breakdown starts. Only when it gets obvious to the uninitiated.

Lines get drawn in the silence. Coran sticks close to Lance. Refuses to let him curl into a ball of his own misery, or—Lance doesn’t fucking know—doesn’t let him take a long walk out a short airlock. Lance thinks about it sometimes in the muggy heat and the dark of New Altea’s seemingly endless summer nights. But Coran’d fixed him with one of his piercing stares and said: “You’ll keep this old man company, won’t you, my boy?”

And what the fuck is there even to say in the face of that shameless manipulativeness? No? Like hell.

Pidge all but glues herself to Shiro’s side, at turns defiant and confused. Emotions and social interactions are, after all, not their resident feral hacker’s strong suit. She calls Lance’s objections to Shiro’s wedding bullshit and stupid and jealousy—that last one has Coran reaching over to end the call before the profanity building up inside Lance’s head can get out his mouth—and doesn’t understand why no one will give Curtis a chance.

Like any of this is about _Curtis_.

Lance isn’t sure where Keith hides himself to lick his wounds and honestly doesn’t fucking care. He finds it increasingly difficult to care about much of anything when he’s got an internal calendar that reads: _it has been sixty-two days since you’ve been called ‘Lonce,’ ‘my paladin,’ ‘my own’ and where is she? When will she be back? I need her._ Everything else bleeds to gray around that. He’s sure things are very hard for the favorite son of the universe, but somehow, he just can’t find blood in his shattered heart to bleed for Keith.

* * *

Time moves strangely for Lance.

Things pass him by in weird fits and starts like a stop-motion film on a glitchy projector. Sometimes it feels like a day will never end and he lays spread eagle across his bed staring at the ceiling as the sun paints queer shadows across the room in pinks and oranges that the sun never painted with back on Earth. Sometimes he loses track of a whole week. Just. _Ziiip._ Gone quick like The Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote off a cliff. 

He keeps waiting for something to happen. _Aching_ with the wanting/not wanting.

At some point war had become easier than peace and he doesn’t know what to do with all this time that doesn’t have her in it.

* * *

He’s standing on a beach.

The tide rolls in over his feet, white and frothing. In the distance there’s a great storm gathering all black and full of lightning. He can feel the distant thunder in his bones like the aftershock of a jet hitting the sound barrier. The waves rush in around his ankles, pulling the sand from under his heels, dragging him with them a half-staggering steps. The sea smells like salt and home as he tips his face into the wind and the distant edge of the storm gusts his face with sea spray and rain. He runs his hands through his hair, flicking out the droplets caught there. They flicker, blue-white, in the odd light and hang for a heartbeat before hitting the water, and that blue-white glow bleeds into the ocean like diffusing dye—or blood.

He feels her voice before he hears it.

The sound sinks hooks into his ribs and turns him, all unwilling.

The tide rushes in faster now. Rolling against him with a force that rocks him until its at his knees, battering the backs of his thighs. He tries to take a step towards the shore, unsteady.

Allura is on the beach. 

She’s talking to someone he can’t quite see. A long shadow spilling out in front of her that writhes like beached fish, tendrils of shadowy ink skittering across the golden sand, as it tries escape her. Not talking, he realizes, cursing. Excoriating. There’s a sharp, furious edge to her voice as she pins that shadow down into the sand and lays bare all its sins. A gleaming lance, all fine silver and etched designs, glows in her hands as she leans forward, using her bodyweight to keep her prey trapped.

The sand bleeds, he realizes, into a great desert of bleached bone and broken buildings. It extends far beyond Allura and the shadow she keeps pinned down with silver magic seeping from her hands. Massive dunes cover over forgotten, shattered cities. Everything in it dead, stripped of even the faintest drop of quintessence. He knows, without any understanding of where the realization comes from, that the shadow Allura has speared through against the sand is responsible. That, if she lets it go, it will rise up to devour another desert’s worth of civilizations.

He tries to walk towards her, the water up to his hips now, but the tide steals the sand from under his feet and the wind whips his voice away when he yells her name. The blue-white glow in the water seethes around him, dragging him back into the storm, and he screams. A high, desperate note of sound.

Allura startles. 

He forgets to breath when she turns to see him struggling against the tide. He’s been pulled so far into the ocean his feet barely brush the sand, flailing against the ocean’s iron grip. He only has a sense of her face—eyes wide, expression soft with stunned amazement. So much like the day they’d first met, when she’d put him on the ground as easily as breathing. He starts to smile. She sees him. The water retreats from her as she walks forward, its silver-white edge retreating with every step of her dark feet. She sees him, _she sees him_ , and everything will be all right because she’s there and the ocean lets go of its stranglehold on his throat.

The shadow moves.

It surges up from the sand, no longer pinned in place like a butterfly to a specimen board, with great fluttering wings shot through with a dark purple he will hate until his dying day. It spreads out behind her, malevolent and vast. He shouts a warning. Allura turns with the lance in hand, glowing blue-white in her hand, leaving light streaking across her skin in rippling streamers. 

The tide drags him under. He can’t see anything around the dark water that covers his head and spills down his throat. He’s drowning. He fights his way to the surface, screaming her name. He can’t stay in the water, he knows this. He’ll freeze and drown—his body a wrecked ship slowly turning to corral on the ocean floor. The waves batter him, drag him under with a riptide, and fill his mouth with salt and ice. But he’s a strong swimmer, always has been, and he fights his way up—arms and legs turning the water into froth.

Allura’s fighting the shadow on the beach. 

It whirls away from her in a sinuous slither of smoke and darkness, spilling up into the air as she drives it back away from the water’s edge. He drags himself towards her, each meter a struggle, as she raises the lance for a throw—

* * *

He wakes up to Romelle calling him. 

Lance lies in bed, blankets tangled around his feet and his pillows all over the floor, staring at the vid-screen of his communicator as Romelle’s cute little personal animation makes cute little winking faces at him waiting for him to get up and answer and pretend to be a functioning adult.

He rejects the call. 

Rolls over and pulls the blanket over his head and tries to either forget the universe exists or will himself to die.

Whichever comes first.

* * *

Hunk comes to him with anxiously twisting hands and a stumbling request like Hunk already knows the answer. Like, physically comes to visit so Lance can’t just refuse the call and roll back into the pile of his blankets and pillows and forget the universe continues to spin even though it feels like everything worthwhile in it has died with her.

“You’re really good at planning stuff like this,” he says, all earnest and unsure. Lance hears the hidden question under the pretty compliments. ( _used to, you’d jump at the chance. you'd be all bragging and smiles and now you’re not and i don’t know why. something’s broken in you and i don’t know the name of the part to fix it._ ) “And you know what Shiro’s like.”

“A self-sacrificial idiot trying to appease the ghosts of his dead?”

Hunk blinks and then sighs. “I was going to say, ‘helpless when it comes to social niceties,’ but sure we can go with that if you’re still going to be mad.”

The noise that Lance makes is the bastard lovechild of a snort and scoff and manages to convey without any words at all exactly what he thinks about that.

“I didn’t expect you to get so upset on Keith’s behalf,” Hunk says. 

It physically hurts how hard Lance rolls his eyes. Like, for real, he gives himself a little headache doing it. 

“This isn’t about Keith. I realize that might come as a major shock to the entire universe, but not everything revolves around Keith.” Lance considers that statement for a second and then grimaces. “Though I can’t imagine he’s dealing with this well. The entire thing is shitty and gonna blow up in everybody’s faces.”

The way Hunk fidgets manages to be pained. His broad, handsome face twists into an unhappy frown. “Yeah,” Hunk sighs. “Keith’s pretty messed up. You know Shiro actually asked if Keith could be his best man?”

Lance can help it. He stares. He makes a little abortive hand gesture in the air that doesn’t mean anything at all but apparently still conveys his entire sense of _what the entire fucking fuck?_ because Hunk sighs again. Lance rakes a hand through his hair and then stomps around the room like that will help him make sense of whatever the fuck is going on inside Shiro’s head. 

“He’s just … determined to light his entire fucking life on fire,” Lance finally decides. It’s the only thing that makes any sort of sense.

“He could be in love,” Hunk says, ever the optimist. “Curtis is very sweet.”

Lance turns around and just _looks_ at him until Hunk heaves another sigh. 

“Leaving Curtis’ better qualities to one side, why the fuck are you asking me to do anything with a wedding?” Lance asks with all the calmness he absolutely doesn’t feel. The expression on Hunk’s face doesn’t make any fucking sense because on anyone else, it’d read as confusion, pure and simple. But there’s no way that Hunk can possibly be confused as to why Lance wants less to do with weddings than a devout Muslim wants to do with alcohol. “Much less this wedding?”

“You like weddings?”

It takes Lance a second to realize that Hunk is absolutely and completely serious with this statement. Says it without a shred of irony. Says it like he’s noting that, yes indeed, water is wet and fire is hot and Lance likes weddings. Are there any other obvious statements that he wants Hunk to make? It boggles Lance’s mind a little how completely earnest Hunk manages to be with his big brown eyes and hands that can’t stay still for longer than thirty seconds. 

“Seriously,” Lance says quietly. There’s more that he wants to say about what Hunk can do with all of that and the way he keeps looking at Lance like he’s about to suddenly jump up and say: ‘yes, of course, I love weddings and am in no way a complete fucking disaster that spends more time than is healthy thinking about exactly how long it’d take me to vent an airlock before Coran can manually re-engage the safety protocols.’ 

(Spoiler alert: no time spent on this train of thought is a healthy amount.)

Lance tolerates Hunk’s wheedling for about another five stuttered sentences and awkward jokes aimed at Lance’s supposed place as the frivolous one before he completely loses it and throws a chair.

“Get out,” he says into the stunned silence. Hunk’s staring at the chair like it’d teleported all by itself to attack him. Like he can’t believe that Lance’d actually flung it at his head. Lance’s chest feels too tight, crushed inward as if there’s a black hole living in the cage of his ribs trying to suck everything in. His heart is a dead star and everything in its orbit dies. “I’m done talking about this.” 

Coran pops into the room so quick Lance is willing to bet good money that he doesn’t actually have that he’s been idling around the door just waiting for Lance’s uneven temper to give. Lance misses what Coran says as he hustles Hunk out of the room, only gets the sense of Coran’s forceful cheer barely covering over his iron will. The room is very still in their wake as if all the sound had fled, following Hunk’s stunned footsteps. Lance is exhausted. It comes over him like a tidal wave hitting the shore. Complete and overwhelming. Standing up feels like too much work, so he just collapses downward until he’s a puddle on the floor.

Coran finds him some indeterminate amount of time later, all his limbs tucked in close like he’s trying to preserve heat, and chives him into the shower and food and bed.

Hunk doesn’t come asking him questions about weddings after that.

* * *

“What the fuck part of ‘fucking no’ was so difficult to understand?” Lance demands.

“The part where you thought you could give me, founder and high priestess of the church of putting up with all your ridiculous shit, sass,” Veronica snaps as she drags him out of his nice warm bed without any sort of respect for his delicate emotional state. He tries to bite her. She snaps her hand away with practice ease and smacks him upside the head on the return swing. “Get your ass in gear, you have an hour to get ready.”

Lance hooks his fingers under the bed frame and kicks at her, an uncoordinated flailing of limbs. “Fuck no.”

“Fuck yes,” his sister says, devoid of anything approximating sisterly affection or sympathy. She catches one foot easily and strips him of his pajama pants. 

And then he’s faced with frankly horrifying prospect of Veronica stripping him down like she had when he was nine and had decided in a fit brilliance that what he really needed to do was to hit the big wasps’ nest with a rock just to see if he could. (He could. It’d been a mistake he’d immediately regretted. Like, wow, had that been a way to learn a lesson in cause and effect in a hurry.) And had gotten wasps all through his clothes, angry and vengeful and stinging the shit out of him. (Fuck wasps.) Veronica’d solved that problem by stripping him down to his birthday suit and turning the hose on him. 

The prospect of her doing it again, with both of them arguably grown ass adults, is a thing literally no one should be faced with ever.

“I object,” he says, more testing than definitive. 

Veronica’s glasses glint in a meaningful manner.

He’s showered, dressed, and minimally publicly presentable in record time.

* * *

“I had been under the impression that you weren’t going to grace us with your presence today.”

Lance eyes James Griffin suspiciously. James is, of course, the picture of military perfection from the top of his ridiculous floppy haircut to the tips of his polished shoes. Lance thinks about making a cutting remark about James’ hair but can’t find the energy. “I was overruled,” he says instead. “Apparently my life is planned by committee and my sister has executive veto powers.”

James coughs into one hand in a way that does precisely nothing to hide the fact that he’s snickering. Lance is reminded suddenly that Veronica is in James’ immediate chain of command. He’s probably come up against Veronica and her glinty glasses of doom before and lost. There’s a solid twenty seconds where all of Lance’s little brother instincts rear up and demand that he trot out every embarrassing story about his darling sister while she’s out of earshot and thus can’t immediately retaliate. 

But the impulse dies as quickly as it’s born. He’s too tired. Even the possibility of humiliating his sibling can’t hold his attention around the bone deep ache of _she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone_ that beats in time with his every breath. 

“Veronica is very used to getting her way,” James says mildly.

Lance shrugs one shoulder, diffident and uninterest under the sudden weight of memories. The reception hall is filled with stargazer lilies. Hundreds of them filling the air with their delicate scent. ( _on the third day after he’d woken up in garrison medical, he’d filled her entire room with lilies so they’d be the first thing she’d see. he still doesn’t know where the nursing staff had found all the flowers, but they’d taken to the challenge like it was vital to the war effort and he’s still grateful to them for that, for the way her eyes had fluttered open with a smile because of the smell. she'd looked at him and said—_ ) James is talking when Lance blinks himself back to reality.

“What?”

James is good. He doesn’t even blink at Lance’s sudden confused dislocation. “Would you like a drink?”

“Are you coming onto me?” Lance asks on reflex. 

For a moment he’s worried that it’s going to be awkward. That James is going to be thrown by Lance’s ongoing dumpster fire train wreck of a self, but James just looks him over lazily. Starts at the top of Lance’s head where his hair is a half-brushed mess and ends at his shoes which don’t at all go with the white suit Veronica’d shoved him into. (Literally shoved. Taken his arms and stuck them through the suit jacket while Lance’d imitated a ragdoll.) And then makes the circuit back up again. James shrugs, all elegant arrogance in his officer’s uniform, and waggles his hand side to side.

“Enh,” James says.

“Oh, fuck you,” Lance says and feels, for no reason that he can understand, like laughing.

* * *

Somewhere into about an hour or so of awkward reception time where the blushing newlyweds cut the cake and have their first dance and are disgustingly soppy at each other and their guests are required to talk amongst themselves like they give even half a shit about these random people they are never going to see again, Keith sidles up to Lance looking hunted, wounded, and bleeding all over the scenery. Lance gives him a suspicious side eye. But Keith just settles against the wall next to him. Curls around his drink like it’s the only thing providing him moral and physical support and doesn’t say anything. 

Which is just fine.

If Keith doesn’t say anything then Lance won’t have to delve into his rapidly diminishing hoard of energy to pretend to give a fuck about Keith’s tattered heart.

Honestly, Keith should’ve followed Matt’s lead and just loudly and publicly cursed Shiro out so he didn’t have to come to this horror show of a social event but Keith manages to have even less social awareness than a desiccated Egyptian mummy that’s been eaten by weird white colonialists with an Orientalism fetish. 

A lady with Curtis’ dark colouring and high cheekbones looks like she’s going to drift over in their direction. A delicate flush paints the tops of her cheeks and brings a sparkle to her eyes. ( _she’d caught the corner of his sleeve with two fingers, looking so sweet and flustered with a blush across the tops of her cheeks and up her delicate ears that Lance’d thought his heart’d stop right there, and asked if he could teach her to dance because dance was important for so many cultures on Earth and Lance’d grinned and said—_ ) Curtis’ relative blanches, paling visibly even through that dark skin tone, and changes her direction. Lance has no idea what expression his face is making, but he can’t regret it if it means that he gets left the fuck alone.

Next to him Keith relaxes further. It’s a pretty subtle thing, just an easing of his shoulders against the wall and his eyes losing some of that hunted look, but Lance’s gotten pretty good at reading Keith through sheer self-defense. Have to know, after all, when the lone wolf is gonna throw himself out an airlock or try to one-v-one duel the self-styled lord emperor of the known universe or whatever other damned fool thing Keith takes into his head. Sometimes, Lance isn’t sure how any of them managed to survive ( _not that all of them did because she’d caught his face between her hands and her fingers were so cold and said--_ ) when Keith’s preferred leadership style is ‘charge’ with no second step.

Every so often Keith shoots him a sideways look that’s worryingly reminiscent of the expression he used to wear when calculating the odds of some impossible fight. (The Blades had managed to take all of Keith’s worst impulses and exacerbate them. Lance’d have words with Kolivan about that if he could find the energy to care. But he can’t, so he doesn’t.) And Lance doesn’t appreciate having that look applied to him.

“Why aren’t you with Pidge,” Keith asks so softly that Lance almost misses it, “or Hunk?”

Lance wants to ask why Keith isn’t with Hunk, since the two were all but inseparable in the aftermath of the war, but he’s not quite that cruel. Not normally. Keith doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look at the dancefloor (someone, somewhere, had taught Shiro how to waltz and he leads Curtis through it only sometimes stumbling and when Keith’s eyes catches on them he winces like a broken bone’s been jostled) and Lance is filled with exhaustion to the point that he feels like if he opens his mouth it’ll come spilling over his teeth. 

There are no words to explain that he is a trailing shroud of misery, a sovev in human form, and he does not like himself, and yet he cannot find the energy to change. 

“Because Pidge will try to piss me off,” he says, flat as Hunk’s favorite level, “and Hunk will try to make me laugh. They will try to fix me. They will want a _reaction_ and I don’t have the energy to react right now.”

Lance punctuates this by finishing off whatever hell drink James’d scrounged up for him. It’s amber and burns on the way down. He thinks he might have a good buzz going if he can find it around the edges of the apathy that’s ridden him ever since they’d all stumbled back onto the Atlas and told the universe that they’d won, huzzah, huzzah. ( _they’d won but she’s dead and Lance can’t find it in him to care about anything anymore because she’d looked at him and said—_ ) Keith continues to watch him like he’s a puzzle Keith’s putting together piece by piece. 

Once upon a time it would’ve upset Lance to have that look turned on him, but now the idea of being upset seemed like an impossible amount of emotional work.

“Oh,” says Keith, soft, and then says nothing else.

Yeah. _Oh_.

* * *

Romelle finds them about an hour after the dancing starts in earnest. 

It hurts something small and fragile inside Lance to look at her. She looks like Allura with the saturation turned all wrong. Too warm and rounded where Allura’d been a sleek, deadly piece of business. Romelle is all golden and flushed and happy. Well, okay. Not exactly happy, because there’s that Valkyrie glint riding in her big blue eyes because Romelle’s clearly caught the edge of awkwardness and misery lingers in the corners of what should be the most raucous party the universe has ever seen. 

She plants herself in front of Keith as if she doesn’t see the way Lance curls away from her like he’s been burned.

“Is it common,” she demands, “for the most attractive best friend of the groom to not attend the groom’s nuptials?”

Keith looks at Lance for a half a second like he can makes any sort of sense of that statement. Lance’d like it noted for the record that he cannot, because what the fuck?

“I wanted to dance with the rebel leader, only I was informed that he is not in attendance,” Romelle continues with an airy disregard for the confusion she’s sowing amongst the former Paladins of Voltron. Or at least two of them. “Why has Matthew refused to attend the festivities?”

Oh. Like hell is Lance going to touch this one with a fifty-foot pole. 

Keith stutters, shivers a little in obvious pain, and then falls silent. Shit is painful to watch. Not even metaphorically painful, like, actually physically painful. 

“That’s a question you should ask Pidge,” Lance cuts in. Romelle looks at him. Her eyes look so much like Allura’s but the blue is just slightly the wrong shade. Her face softens as they stare at each other.

“Lance,” she says softly as if just noticing him or maybe just stunned at his sudden willingness to talk to her. “Are you well?”

Lance laughs at that. It’s a short, rough bark of noise that draws the stares from people around them. It is not a happy sound. 

“I’m going to get another drink,” he says rather than answer that question because there’s no answers for that one that don’t end in screaming. He waves a hand in the vague direction of where he thinks Pidge is holding court. “Go pester Pidge about her brother. He’s her favorite subject—” this is a lie, but Lance is petty when he’s feeling spiteful “—and you,” he says this to Keith, who blinks up at him, “keep holding up the wall. Wouldn’t want it to fall down or anything.”

Neither of them says anything as he stalks off in search of something strong and tasteless. He can feel the weight of their combined stares like a burn on his back.

* * *

Eventually the crowd of family and friends and people who just wanted to say that they were there on the momentous day that Captain Takashi Shirogane, hero of the Galra war, had gotten married. And then it gets awkward. Real awkward. Because there’s no one there to act as a buffer between Lance, who can’t scrounge up the emotional resources to be anything more than present, and the giddy newlyweds. (Or between Lance and his supposed best friends who keep watching him like he’s gonna turn around and bite a party guest like a dog that’s gone rabid.) And Shiro gets that look on his face that he’s gonna do something real noble and real stupid.

Lance can see it in the way that he squares his shoulders back and his jaw does that honorable war hero thing.

But then Curtis lays a hand on Shiro’s arm, smiles sweetly, and makes his way over to Lance like a sacrificial lamb to the slaughter. That’s probably not a nice thing to think, but that’s what Lance is reminded of as Curtis plants himself in front of him like Curtis expects a fight.

“Thank you for coming,” he says in that low, soft voice of his and, oh man, Curtis does not deserve the shitshow he’s been embroiled in. Not even a little.

“Thank my sister,” Lance says because it’s true and because he wants this conversation to have ended, like, twenty minutes ago. 

At some point between Shiro catching sight of them holed up in their dark corner of gloom and Curtis marching himself over like he’s not got a lick of sense between his pretty ears, Keith’d up and vanished like the space ninja he apparently still is. Lance’d feel betrayed, but that seems like too much work. All Lance can really manage is a faint recognition of Keith’s absence. It registers like an aftereffect.

If Curtis notices the absence of one half-Galra disaster area, he doesn’t show it.

“Still,” Curtis insists softly, “it means a lot to him.”

“Yeah,” Lance says slowly. “Optics would be bad if any of the surviving paladins ditched.”

Veronica’d made that point repeatedly. Along with _he’s your friend, you miserable little asshole, even if you’re pissed with him right now,_ and Lance’d run out of any sort of steam to argue with her. 

He expects Curtis to look offended at that, or maybe hurt, but Curtis just looks sad. Like he’s watching a Greek tragedy play out. “I’m sorry I’ve driven a wedge between you all,” he says because of course Shiro would go and find someone exactly as self-sacrificing and self-effacing and all the other self-isms that Shiro likes to use as razorblades against himself. Of course, he would. “It was never my intention.”

“You haven’t done anything,” Lance tells him because its suddenly very important that Curtis hear that. “None of this is about you. If anything, you deserve better than this.”

Curtis gives him a faintly bemused little frown. “Better than Takashi? I’m not sure that’s possible.”

And aw shit, of course Curtis looks at Shiro with stars in his eyes and tenderness in his heart because who the fuck wouldn’t if Shirogane came up to them with all his earnest charm and helpless nobleness? This whole thing is monstrously unfair and Lance wants to find someone to blame just so he can take their fucking knees out with a fucking baseball bat, but there’s no one here to point the finger at except themselves and the trauma they hoard like misers with gold on Christmas Eve. Shit’s fucked. Shit has been fucked for a long time.

Curtis lets him work through all that without even fidgeting. Just stands there solid and patient and achingly kind. 

Lance thinks, for half a second, that, hey, maybe this thing could possibly work with someone like Curtis. Then reality reasserts itself. Because this isn’t about Curtis. It’s about Adam going down in flames and Shiro branding Keith’s cheek with a mark neither of them can move past and Allura walking into the rift like that made any kind of fucking sense.

“You’d be surprised,” Lance says, mean in his apathy. Curtis doesn’t even look at him like he’s surprised or mad, just curious. Lance shrugs. “Leave him, Janice.” Lance waves a hand through air as if he could generate the words that fail to come out of his mouth through random action. “Get an annulment. Get a divorce. Run away. Just.” Lance shakes his head. Exhaustion eats away the burst of emotion that’d been fueling his words and he runs dry. “Get away.”

Get away from all of them and their festering crazy that none of them are willing to deal with. Nice people don’t deserve their bullshit, and from what Lance can see, Curtis is very nice.

“I really don’t think you’re supposed to tell the groom to leave his intended at the altar on the day of his wedding,” Curtis says lightly. “Unless we’re in a bad rom-com and you’ve been secretly carrying a torch for me all this time.”

There’s a question in there, under the gentle humor, that’s not aimed at Lance. Not really. It’s aimed at Keith and, if everyone’s being honest, Matt. But Lance thinks that Curtis has the self-preservation instinct to avoid asking that question of _Matt_. And is clearly too gentle to ask it of Keith, who’d just bleed harder on the scenery.

“I’m offended, Janice,” Lance says instead of any of the things running through his head. “You don’t remember the promise we made each other when I was five and you were six and—”

“We rode horses made of sticks,” Curtis finishes. He forms finger guns and mimes, “bang, bang I shot you down.”

Aw, fuck. Lance didn’t want to like this dude. It’s gonna suck even more when everything goes to shit.

“Leave him,” he repeats and even in his own ears he sounds tired.

* * *

He’s floating on his back in the ocean. 

He doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t want the dream to end quite yet.

Someone is talking right behind him, their voice rising and falling like the tides, explaining exothermic reactions and the basics of Altean alchemy and Galran theology. There’s also a story being told of a queen and teacher and thousands of years’ worth of rebellion in the name of kindness. A story of the brutality of sacrifice. Lance cocks his head without opening his eyes, just letting her voice roll over him in one continuous strip of sound, and floats in the warm, still water.

Something heavy hits his abdomen and he fold up, falls under, come back sputtering saltwater.

“Did you get that?” Allura asks. Behind her, a long blue lance spears a shadow to the warped boards of a pier. 

He flails one hand at her, and opens his mouth to say—

* * *

He wakes up with the taste of salt on his lips, breath shuddering through his frame.

Hunk calls, like he’s been calling every day since the disaster that calls itself Takashi Shirogane’s wedding. On a random whim ( _not because he’s dreamed of her and it makes him feel guilty and aching and mean with the pain—_ ) Lance finds himself answering. Hunk takes in his rumpled, nightmare-disheveled self and makes a lot of disappointed faces at him until Lance hangs up. 

He lets all of Hunk’s calls go straight to messages after that.

* * *

Somehow Curtis Adama takes Lance repeatedly telling him to divorce Shiro and run away from the dumpster fire that is the surviving Paladins of Voltron on his damned wedding day as an overture of friendship. Clearly, the dude is touched in the head.

“You’re fucking crazy, you know that?” Lance tells him when Curtis calls for the thirtieth fucking time and Coran starts making pointed comments about manners until Lance manages to ass himself into answering.

Curtis grins. Lance suspects the possibility of dimples. “I may have heard that hurtful remark about my person before.”

“Did you call for life advice?” Lance wonders. “Because my advice remains the same: leave him, Janice.”

“You know my name is Curtis,” comes the mild response. “I saw you write it on the card with your gift. Thank you, by the way, for the cast iron set. They are very nice.”

“My sister wrote those out,” Lance tells him. “And glad you liked them. Maybe you can use them to brain him and make your get away to, like, Tahiti or something.”

“You are very stuck on this for someone who isn’t in love with Takashi,” Curtis notes. He sounds like he thinks this is funny. Like Lance is making some kind of long running joke. Lance is absolutely not joking. This shit is gonna explode like a Galran quintessence refinery—burning shrapnel, screaming, and no survivors. 

Lance just kinda looks at Curtis as he feels all the energy run out of him like water into desert sand. “I don’t like watching people get hurt if I can help it,” he says, too tired to be anything other than honest. “And we all know this shit is gonna blow up.”

Curtis looks away. Fucking bullseye. Again. Small gods save him from pretty men with self-destructive streaks that take the form of martyrdom. “He’s agreed to therapy.”

“Good. Great. Grand,” Lance says. “He needs it. And we both know this is still going to blow up on you. _Leave him, Janice._ ”

Curtis mugs an annoyed face but gives up halfway through the performance and just looks sad. “That’s not my name.”

"As long as you insist on acting like a white lady in a made-for-television melodrama your name is Janice. Also, leave him.” Lance tacks on that last bit just for how it makes Curtis roll his eyes aggressively. 

“I’m not going to do that,” Curtis says. He’s very pretty when he’s being all solemn and intense. It probably makes it real easy for Shiro to convince himself he’s in love when Curtis can pull that face out of his bag of tricks. “I’m not going to leave him unless he wants me gone.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Lance tells him because it’s obvious he’s not going to listen to anything sensible. 

Curtis makes a face like he knows.

* * *

He’s sitting in his abuelo’s fishing boat, the waves batter the sides as the boards creak alarmingly. There’s a storm closing in fast. The dark edge of the clouds eating all the light from the horizon, covering over the sun, and thunder rolls over the water like a predator’s growl. If the storm hits the boat, it’ll sink without a doubt in Lance’s mind.

Allura’s sitting at the bow. 

He staggers up, tripping over his own feet and the fishing nets that lay in a sodden heap at the bottom of the boat.

She turns right as the edge of the storm breaks around them, driving the waves into a high crest. Her eyes glow blue-white in the center of the storm. He can see her mouth moving, forming words, and she says—

* * *

He wakes up to the smell of space wolf and machine oil.

“What the shit?” Lance says to the soft darkness of his room. There’s someone sitting on his legs. 

“Romelle says you won’t talk to her,” Keith says like that explains fucking anything about anything.

“And why are you telling me this at one in the fucking morning?”

Keith moves just enough to yank the blinds over his window open, flooding his room with sunlight. Lance yelps and tries to huddle under his blankets, but someone is sitting on his knees with malice aforethought. He thinks, for a moment, about hitting Keith with a pillow but even thinking about moving fills him painful fatigue.

“It’s three in the afternoon,” Keith says like he’s laying down the winning card.

“Fuck you,” Lance says because he’s got nothing left to say. The mere idea of conversation fills him with apathetic dread. The memory of the dream sucks everything out of him. He’s forgetting the sound of her voice and something in him wants to die with that knowledge. “Go die in a space ditch.”

“No,” Keith replies like that’d been a comment demanding an answer. One of these days someone’s got to sit down and teach Keith the concept of metaphorical statements because it’s embarrassing having one of the former leaders of Voltron wandering around with gaps in his literary knowledge that a solid eleventh grade English course could fix. “Why aren’t you talking to Romelle?”

Lance stares at him for a long time trying to will him to put the damned puzzle pieces together himself rather than forcing Lance to do the exhausting work of finding the words to put the emotions in when all he wants to do is lay down and die. Keith, however, chooses this precise point in time to demonstrate his determined disregard for anything approximating social delicacy. Just keeps watching Lance like he expects an answer and is willing to wait until the heat death of the fucking universe to get one.

If Lance could find the emotional wherewithal to be annoyed, he’d really hate Keith right about now.

But Lance can’t, so he just kinda … flails one hand and sighs. Keith waits some more. His weight across Lance’s legs is weirdly comforting. Like he can keep Lance from flying to fucking pieces with body weight alone. This is, of course, a lie. But it’s a pretty one.

Lance drops a hand over his eyes and groans. Keith can be as patient as the grave (haha _grave_ ) when he wants to be and it figures that he only wants to demonstrate that patience with Lance when it comes to digging his fingers into Lance’s wounds and pulling them just a little more open. 

“Romelle is Allura’s best friend,” Lance says. They both hear the tense bobble, but Keith doesn’t correct him. Then again, Keith’s done the death and loss and grieving dance before. Even though he’d gotten Shiro back because the universe will never really hurt Keith Kogane for long. Keith probably knows about how hard tenses become in the wake of … everything.

The silence stretches out between them like silly putty, all tacky with emotions and gross. Eventually Keith shifts like Lance’s knees are boney (they are) and says: “And?”

“And?” Lance repeats. He wants to be indignant or offended or something, but all he can manage is type of exhausted annoyance. “What do you think she’s gonna want to talk about, samurai?”

“Allura,” Keith answers promptly like it’s obvious, which it is, so Lance doesn’t know why Keith is here fucking with his sleep cycle. (Like his sleep cycle isn’t perma-fucked already.)

Lance makes a broad ‘so you see’ gesture. 

Keith just waits a little longer until Lance huffs an annoyed sound at him.

“Guess what I _don’t_ want to talk about?”

“Allura.”

Lance waves his hands with a little more force. Irritation finally bubbles its way up through his exhaustion and he actually starts scrounging for a pillow to smack Keith with. “So why the fuck are you here, digging your metaphorical fingers into my metaphorical wounds, and being in general an enormous asshole? I know we aren’t friends, but this shit is a whole new level of fucked. Rather than bothering me, why don’t you fuck along off and die?”

The expression that snaps across Keith’s face is one that Lance doesn’t have the resources to decipher even if he had the energy. Which he doesn’t. But Keith tucks that way behind his normal blank wall of annoyance quick enough that they can both pretend that Lance didn’t see it. 

Lance is reminded, all of a sudden and with the force of truck hitting a wall, of scoffing loudly like an asshole about Shiro leaving Black and leadership and fucking everything else to Keith like that’s something people can do. Reminded of Keith’s gutted expression. If he had anything left of him other than a sort of scratchy flatness he’d feel like an ass now that the universe has up decided to acquaint him personally with grief and all the ways it royally sucks. 

But he’s been stripped raw of everything but a slouching sort of resentment that he’s still alive and she’s not, so all he does is kinda glare up at Keith petulantly.

“Romelle misses you,” Keith says. This is not what Lance’d expected to fall out of Keith’s mouth. 

“What?” Lance’s demand for clarification comes out as a flat sort of atonal grunt. 

“She misses Allura,” Keith says like that’s an elaboration. It’s not. They stare at each other until Lance’s legs start to go kinda numb. Keith huffs out an annoyed sound. “She misses Allura and she misses you and she wants to _talk,_ only you can’t talk to her, so she sent me.”

Something clicks inside Lance’s head. Keith’s wearing the type of annoyed put-upon face that Lance’s seen on his own face a million times. It’s the expression he wears whenever Veronica’s decided that Lance exists to be her personal valet or some shit.

“Oh,” Lance says faintly. “She’s adopted you.”

Keith wrinkles his nose. “What? She can’t adopt me. She’s our age and I’ve found my mom anyway.”

Lance pats his thigh because it’s cute how Keith thinks that means fucking anything to anyone. “Yeah,” Lance says mostly to himself. “She totally adopted you.”

* * *

Somewhere in between Curtis thinking that they should become _friends_ and Romelle siccing Keith on Lance like Keith can do anything about fucking anything, Lance learns Altean. Both versions—pre and post-Colony. (It settles something in his soul that Alteans collectively also think in terms of Before and After, even if their Before and After is set on a slightly different time scale.) He hits something approaching fluency faster than anyone has any right to, as if something inside his head had just been waiting for the right switch to get flipped. 

It starts with a grocery list.

Coran fenagles Lance into doing all the grocery shopping because Coran is a manipulative bastard and apparently walking around outside and socializing is good for you and no amount of protests to the contrary will dissuade the old man.

The first time Coran presses a crumpled slip of paper into his hand and pats his back like his abuelo used to when he was five and abuelo’d sent him off to buy the smokes that abuelo absolutely shouldn’t’ve had, the list’d been in perfectly recognizable English. The letters all sloping off the page ( _so different from her neat script with its curving vowels like she thought you needed to write them as round as you said them. he’d teased her and she’d laughed and said—_ ) but still in a language he knew.

Lance is pretty sure even the second and third lists were in English. Full of random ass ingredients that Lance’d sometimes pretended he couldn’t find because like fuck is he gonna find out what _arckali snark soup_ tastes like if he can help it, but still in English.

The fourth list is where things had gotten hinky, Lance thinks. Is fairly positive even though his sense of time is buried under the gray-flat cloud of grief and depression..

It’s only around grocery list seven or so when he’s standing in the middle of New Altea’s big open market with a list in one hand and a weird buzzing between his ears that he realizes that what he’s looking at is _Altean_ and what’s worse he can _read_ it. He doesn’t know why he feels like he’s going to start screaming in the middle of the market in front of God and everyone, but he does. 

His hands shake as he stares at the list. 

Vision gets spots. 

His breath leaves him in hard, desperate little pants that hurt his chest. 

Someone notices that he hasn’t moved in the past twenty minutes and hustles him into one of the tea shops with cushions slung over low benches that Alteans like so much. Then there’s someone pushing tea into his hands. A bit of a soft, crumbling scone. It’s hard to eat and cry at the same time, which probably why they do it. 

He drinks the tea and eats the scone and hiccups out words that sound like _I’m fine_ but apparently translate into _oh god I’m having a whole ass mental breakdown, please send help_.

A nice little old lady kneels next to him. Her hands are wrinkled. Lance notices that even as the rest of the world seems very far away and fuzzy. She puts a cookie in his hand. He eats it. She pours golden tea into a cup of delicate china and carefully wraps his fingers around it. She holds his hands against the cup until she’s satisfied that he can hold it on his own. He drinks it. 

_I’m fine_ , he says, but the words feel strange in his mouth. Like his tongue has forgotten how to form the sounds correctly. 

_No_ , she says, and the words sound odd. Vowels slip-sliding around into places that they don’t belong. _You are not,_ and oh, oh, Lance realizes with a jolt that she’s speaking Altean and he understands her and when did that happen? She looks at him steadily as tears dry on his cheeks. She rubs at the marks there. Lance wonders if they are glowing. They do that sometimes. _But you will be._

* * *

It’s some time past o’dark thirty and there’s someone sitting on his legs. Again. 

“You learned Altean.”

“And you still haven’t learned how to function like a normal godsdamned adult rather than a feral fucking goblin raised by desert coyotes.” 

Keith snorts, but doesn’t move from where he’s perched on Lance’s legs, pinning him to the bed with a surprising amount of weight for such a skinny dude. “The Blades could use a translator,” Keith says like that’s a reasonable proposition to be making at someone at four in the godsdamned morning. “Since you aren’t doing anything.”

Lance yanks the covers off his face and glares. “It’s four in the fucking morning and you want to come and harp at me about my unemployed status? Really? When did you develop a nagging fetish you absolutely have to show off right the fuck now?”

There’s a weird moment when Keith, no shit, _grins_ down at him before tipping sideways in a move Lance is pretty certain no regular human can imitate and yanks the blinds back from the window. Lance thinks Keith maybe enjoys doing that way more than he really should. Lance glares resentfully at the soft late afternoon sunlight that spills into his room.

“It’s almost evening,” Keith says all smug even though Lance can’t see a single fucking reason for him to be smug, but then Keith never did make a lick of sense. “Coran says dinner will be an hour.”

Lance makes a face. “Are you staying?’

Keith considers him for a long moment. “Do you want me to?”

Lance shrugs. It’s hard to put into words the fact that Lance doesn’t really _want_ things anymore since the one thing he wants ( _her hand in his, cool to the touch because Alteans run at a lower base temperature, she keeps calling him the universe’s most sarcastic toaster and—_ ) he can never have. They look at each other for a moment before Keith tips his head to the side, all contemplative and considering.

“I probably shouldn’t leave you to suffer through Coran’s cooking alone,” Keith says thoughtfully and on anyone else the tone could be called teasing. “Romelle would be upset with me.”

“Please go fuck yourself and die.”

* * *

“How long have we been speaking Altean?” He asks Coran later.

Coran stops murdering something could be salsa if Lance stages a timely intercession. (The struggle to get Coran to accept Earth recipes has been a hard one, but one Lance refuses to abandon.) For a moment Lance thinks Coran is going to lie, or laugh, or dissemble. 

“Ah,” Coran sighs. “You’ve finally noticed.”

* * *

So.

It goes like this:

Coran is a sneaky bastard. This is a known fact like the escape velocity from Earth’s gravity well is 11.2 km/s or the fact that the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is 15,750 psi greater than at sea level. But sometimes Lance forgets. 

(Lance forgets a lot of things right now. To eat. To get out of bed. The sound of her voice when she’s trying not to laugh.) 

Rather than try to teach Lance Altean like any sort of sensible person with books and vocab sheets and lesson plans, Coran’d started using Lance’s grief induced dislocation to slide bits of grammar, the odd idiom, fragments of poetry into Lance’s general vicinity. And Lance’s adhd-addled ferret of a brain had immediately turned around and hoarded them away into the nooks and crannies of his mind where they could pop up like gremlins at oddest of times. 

Lance’d learned the language on reflex. Through habituation. Osmosis. Surrounded by Alteans who always chatter on in a horrifying hodge-podge of borrowed grammars and stolen words, his brain had, even under all the grief and depression, latched onto that shit and eaten it right up. 

Makes sense in a weird, ass-backwards kind of way. He’d already learned English after all, and that language is a clusterfuck.

Alteans, being a race of shape-shifting diplomats, had apparently never thought anything odd of his messy slaughter of their language because they treated linguistic rules as the barest of suggestions. Lance kind of wonders if it’s even possible to learn the language through formal study given how completely willing more than half the native speakers are to just toss two thirds of their own grammar out the window in favor of that shiny new grammar over there. 

The way it continues, however, goes like this:

Once Lance is aware that he’s been learning Altean through the backdoor, he dives into that shit like it’s the ocean at Veradero Beach on a clear day and he can swim for forever. 

He gets so into it that _Sam Holt_ sends him something to translate all official like for the Garrison and Lance spends a solid twenty-six hours straight on that shit before sending it back with little annotated notes about some of the more fiddly idioms that really don’t translate correctly unless you realize that Alteans don’t settle into their adult form until they’re, like, fifteen or some shit so they have an entire lexicon based around unwilling shape shifting that’s kinda like joking about a stiff breeze making teenage boys pop boners. It’s interesting. He’s _interested_. He maybe crashes for another twenty-four hours solid because being that awake and aware eats away all his mental resources like woah, but he does it.

He spends three days reading obscure Altean poetry from the pre-Voltron era. Quotes that shit like he’s a hipster trying to score. Argues with the grandma at the teashop about meter and pacing and wonders at what point he lost control of his entire fucking life.

Coran laughs his head off the first time Lance makes a pun. 

Veronica sits on the other side of the video conferencing screen with that little smile that screams that she doesn’t give a flaming fuck about any of the things he’s saying, but she’s so happy to have him so into _something_ that she’s willing to listen.

So. Yeah. Learning Altean might’ve actually saved his life. No lie.

* * *

Hunk hears that he’s learning Altean and sends Lance all of her journals.

That’s.

That’s not a good day.

* * *

She calls his name with the vowels all stretched out and the accent in the wrong place. 

He’s got his bayard in one hand and one of her journals in the other. He stares at them knowing that he has to make a choice, that he’s only got chance to make that choice, and he doesn’t know which one is the right one. The bayard is heavy in his hand, the weight comforting, and the journal burns. He reaches out a hand over the edge of the boat—he’s in his abuelo’s fishing boat again—like he’s gonna drop it into the water. The waves surge up the sides like they’re hungry, frothing white like an animal foaming at the mouth.

“What are you doing?” Allura asks him.

He turns to look at her, hand still stretched over the water that surrounds them, glowing blue-white as if lit by bioluminescent algae. She’s sitting at the bow. Her lance is balanced on her knees, glowing like the water glows. She’s a slim dark figure, sleek and deadly, against the edge of the storm. A shadow spills out behind her, writhing where the glowing water touches it. 

The journal starts to slip out of his hand.

She asks him what he’s doing again. She asks it very calmly. She’s so self-possessed, self-contained as she sits at the bow of his abuelo’s boat with her lance across her knees. Light surges around her, ringing the festering shadow at her back, penned in by her magic.

“Lance.”

The journal tips past his fingertips, tumbling towards the water.

“What are you—"

* * *

He comes awake with a jerk.

Someone’s sitting on his legs. Again. It’s not even a surprise anymore. 

Lance doesn’t bother to open up his eyes. He just grabs a pillow from his pile and smacks Keith straight in the mouth with it as hard as he can. Keith plucks it out of his hands like he’s taking a toy from a toddler and grins down at him, all smugly amused. 

“You’re getting better at this,” Keith announces like this is at all a normal thing to be pleased about. 

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Romelle,” Keith says succinctly and yeah that tracks. Romelle can be like a dog with a bone about the things she wants and if she wants one Lance Serrano together enough to talk about her dead best friend then Keith is going to provide no matter what Lance’s feelings on the matter might be.

Honestly, the weirdest damned thing to come out of the war had been Keith and Romelle’s friendship. Lance doesn’t know how the fuck it functions, and he doesn’t have to understand it to be resentful. 

Lance jogs his knees a little, making Keith bounce. Keith retaliates by trying to smother Lance with the pillow he’d stolen like that’s fair. “Please ,” Lance says all muffled around the pillow and annoyed about it, “fuck off and die.”

“No,” Keith says. “It’s eleven am. Get up. Coran says you’ve been holed up in your room for three days straight and you’re worrying him.”

“Fuck _off_.”

“I brought you a sword.”

Keith says this like it’s supposed to be some kind encouragement or enticement or who even fucking knows because Lance sure as shit doesn’t. 

Lance manages to grapple the pillow away from Keith to glare up at him with actual, honest-to-God anger starting to bubble way under the layers and layers of scratchy exhaustion. “Why the fuck,” Lance says all flat and annoyed and exhausted, “do you think I care about a fucking sword?”

“Because we should spar.”

What the entire fuck on a plate of toasted pita bread?

“Why?” Lance asks out of morbid curiosity even as the anger still bubbles inside his veins like a poison. He’s _tired_. He’s _done_. He doesn’t have it in him to care about Keith or Romelle or some fucking sword. He just wants to ( _she rolls over in the soft artificial light that the Atlas uses to approximate dawn and smiles at him all sleep-hazy and soft and he wants to remember this moment for always until they are old and gray and—_ ) sleep until the end of everything.

“Because Coran says you’ve slept forty-eight hours of the past seventy-two and he’s worried,” Keith says like keeping track of Lance’s sleep cycles is a thing that people do. 

“So?”

The anger’s draining back out of him as suddenly as it had bubbled up. Lance isn’t really interested in Keith’s reply but he’s got a faint feeling like he should ask the question and so he does. The room is dark and still even with Keith sitting on his legs like that’s a normal thing that normal people do. Dark is good. Still is good. He doesn’t have to pretend he’s got the energy to exist after she died when it’s dark and still.

“I know Allura taught you how to fight with a sword.” Keith drops that conversational bomb into the stillness of Lance’s little sanctuary like he’s twelve-year-old tossing pebbles into a pond. Happy and heedless of the ripples they send out. “So, we should spar.”

This is, Lance is vaguely aware, an offering of monumental proportions. For Keith, asking someone to spar is akin to asking them out to the senior prom. Not a thing done lightly. As far as Lance knows, the only one that Keith’s ever willingly asked to spar had been one Takashi Shirogane. He should probably accept that olive branch with the grace and maturity he’s won hard after one intergalactic space war and the death of ….

Fuck it. 

He’s tired.

Lance rolls his hips in one sinuous slither of a movement and spills Keith onto the floor, all startled big eyes and surprise. He hauls himself into a sloppy seat and kinda just looks down at Keith with exhaustion aching in his fucking mitochondria like a wasting sickness. Hunk’d sent him all of her journals and all he wants is for everything to _stop_. He is done with this ride. He wants off. He does not want to spar. He does not want to _talk_.

He just. 

He just doesn’t fucking _want_. Period.

“Get the fuck out,” he says. His voice comes out without any tone at all. It’s stripped bare of even the most basic of inflection. Keith blinks at him. “If you do not leave I will rip out your intestines, dry them, and then use them to hang you from the highest point I can find on New Altea like the messiest of banners to declare how completely and utterly done I am with you and fucking everything in the entire fucking universe. Do you understand me? I will use your nails to design a dapper fucking necklace for display. I will rip out your throat and use your blood for finger paints all over my walls like the craziest fucking inmate in the loony bin. I will use your bones to make a fucking sign to indicate how everyone and everything can just piss off into the abyss because she’s,” Lance’s voice dries up in the middle of that and he chokes. Curls into himself as his voice dies in his throat like someone has reached into his esophagus to yank his vocal cords out by their roots. Keith stares at him, eyes wide and horrified. Lance coughs, once, hard and hacking before choking out: “ _Fuck. Off._ ”

And with that the last of his energy leaves him like someone has come by and siphoned it out of him like a fuel thief in the night. He drops back into his bed, rolls the blankets around himself, and then just lies there. Aching.

He doesn’t hear Keith leave. He doesn’t hear anything at all over his fractured memories of her that haunt him like ghosts on an old battlefield.

* * *

Curtis calls.

And calls. And calls. And calls.

At first all Lance can do is stare blankly at the little call notification screen until it gets shunted into his messages box. Nifty (not nifty) thing about the intergalactic communication network? Your messages box can never get overfull and thus reject any new notifications. They just keep piling up. Like a malevolent wave of demands for attention that Lance just can’t find the energy to give a single, solitary vomit riddled fuck about.

He doesn’t even bother to hit the ‘refuse’ button. Just watches the call count down its arbitrary amount of time before it decides he’s not gonna answer and shunts the entire thing into the abyss of his notifications.

He rolls over and goes back to sleep.

* * *

Lance nearly walks into a wall on his way to the little galley kitchen that’s the site of, like, ninety percent of his fights with Coran. Feet tangling in the ragged edge of his bathrobe, arms pinwheeling, just a whole ass clusterfuck of limbs like he’s a puppet with its strings tangled. Shit is embarrassing. Lance manages to catch himself with one hand on the arch of the threshold between the hallway and what passes for a living room. 

There’s a person in the living room where Lance is pretty certain no person should be. Coran makes faces about Lance’s continued to refusal to even consider entertaining guests—fuck _that_ noise for a whole lot effort that he’s not got the energy for—but largely accepts Lance’s (slightly incoherent) set of reasons for rejecting most forms of social contact. The living room continues to exist as space inside the house that Lance technically knows exists, but has, to his admittedly faulty memory, never actually stepped foot in. So, Lance figures he’s justified for being surprised.

James Griffin arches one immaculately groomed eyebrow at him as Lance does his best beached fish impression.

What the shit?

“What the shit?” Lance barks. His voice is rough from disuse and honestly sounds thoroughly unacceptable for polite company.

“Charming as ever, Serrano,” James comments mildly. He’s lounging on a couch that Lance didn’t know they had, holding a mug of something that steams gently, looking like he belongs right where he is. Lance frowns a him.

He stabs a finger at James and repeats himself, “What the shit?”

James just tilts his head to the side. “You know,” he says conversationally like he’s not in the middle of upending Lance’s entire world with his physical presence in Lance’s living room, “I didn’t think that anyone could upset Kogane as badly as Captain Shirogane can, but you did have to go and prove me wrong.”

Lance makes a face. So that’s what this is about. He’d kinda expected someone to come by and give him a dressing downing for making a series of threats against the precious darling of the universe, but he’s a little surprised (and weirded out) that it’s James motherfucking Griffin who’s decided to pick up that particular duty.

“I was having a bad day,” Lance says shortly.

James snorts. “You’ve been having a bad year and half.”

That. That staggers Lance a little. Has it really been that long? There are gaps in his memory. Long stretches of gray static as if his memory were a computer system with a corrupted drive. He steps into the living room, painfully aware that he’s in a ratty bathrobe, sweats that should have been thrown out years ago, and bare chested. His hand twitches towards his hair for a second before he controls himself.

“Doesn’t explain why you are here,” Lance observes. His voice is all squashed sounding. Choked maybe. Most people dance around the topic of Lance’s grief and the obvious way he’s completely shut down. James is not most people.

“I need a sniper,” James says primly. Lance is, for one hysterical moment, reminded of old Earth movies where the grizzled veteran of some super-secret agency comes to talk the young but embittered hero out of early retirement. Only he’s never been a hero. 

“I thought you had one,” Lance says. 

He leans against the far wall because he’s not sure his legs will continue to support him. There’s absolutely no reason to feel like he’s on unstable ground, but the way James watches him with cool, knowing eyes leaves him feeling like he’s one short step from the nervous breakdown he’s been courting ever since he woke up one morning with Altean on his tongue and the knowledge he’s forgotten the sound of her laugh. 

He feels like Pinocchio caught on the cusp of becoming a real boy. Only he’s been a real boy before and he’s not sure he wants to be a real boy again. 

Real boys have real emotions and those _suck_ massive donkey balls. 

James shrugs. It’s the same elegant movement Lance remembers from Shiro’s wedding. He wonders if James practices it. 

“And now I need two,” James says. He grins suddenly, a knife-flash expression of white teeth against lightly tanned skin. “I heard you rather spectacularly rejected Keith’s offer for you to come play translator for the Blades. I told him you wouldn’t accept a desk job.”

There’s rather a lot to take in with that statement. So much that Lance doesn’t know where to start so he doesn’t bother. Just kinda looks at James all skeptical and scrunched up with the demand for an explanation stamped all over his face. James smiles at him a little and takes a sip from his mug before pulling a face.

“What the hell is in this?” James demands, all offended dignity and muted horror. “The souls of the damned?”

Lance splutters for a moment before the sound that wants to come out of his throat resolves itself into a proper laugh. It’s scratchy as fuck and sounds godsdamned terrible, but it’s a laugh. “Normally we warn people about accepting anything from Coran,” he says around sputtering giggles. “It’s never edible.”

“No wonder you wanted to die,” James mutters. Lance kinda stutters around that statement because it’s just so … bald. A complete and brutal acknowledgement of Lance’s headspace for he doesn’t even fucking know how long. James looks up at him. His eyes are dark with a pain that Lance thinks is way too similar. “You did, didn’t you?”

“I, uh,” Lance stutters into silence. He doesn’t know how to respond that. He can’t fucking deny it because it’s true and fuck him for never really recognizing it. “Uh.”

“And now you don’t,” James says like Lance isn’t in the middle of having a whole ass existential crisis from those blunt questions that aren’t questions at all.

Something mean and resentful rears up in Lance’s chest and makes it out his mouth before he can get his filter to come back online. “What the fuck do you know about it?” He demands. He almost doesn’t recognize his own voice, all harsh and broken. “What do you. Just, fucking. Fuck _off_.”

James just cocks his head to the side. “Keith isn’t the poor little orphan anymore, is he?” James says with a lightness in his voice that’s nowhere on his face. “Someone took up that mantle.” He waves a hand over himself where he lounges on the couch, an arrogant slouch of a man. His face is full of the self-deprecating humor Lance recognizes all too well. “Though I’d argue I’m not little.”

“That’s what she said,” Lance says because his mouth is totally capable of running with no input from his brain, like, ninety percent of the time.

James just snorts. 

Lance shoves himself off the wall and staggers over to where James watches him from under his eyelashes. There’s a tension thrumming under James’ skin that Lance doesn’t understand, but it’s a twin to the strange energy that’s got him kicking James’ knees apart so he can sit on the low coffee table in front of him. They study each other like there’s gonna be a test. James has a scar, high on his left cheekbone, like someone decide to take a divot out of that perfect skin. He doesn’t know what James sees in his face and James doesn’t say.

“How do you—,” Lance gestures raggedly when his voice dies in his throat like someone’d poured pesticide into his mouth and his words are all weeds.

“You don’t,” James answers. He shrugs again. The gesture is sharp and kinda mean and Lance wonders why he’d ever thought it was graceful. James sneers but Lance doesn’t think the expression is meant for him. James is looking somewhere off Lance’s left shoulder, not seeing him at all. 

“People will tell you it gets better,” James says. Lance jerks, a little, when James laughs, bitter as cold expresso. “It doesn’t get better. It just gets familiar.” James finally looks at him and Lance suddenly remembers that James’d been the baby of a military family. The spoiled youngest of a long line of brothers. Treasured and pampered and adored and of course that had driven Keith right up a fucking wall. James gestures with his mug like he’s toasting someone. Or flipping them off. “You learn to live with a limp.”

And yeah, yeah that sounds about right. Some things, they don’t heal. A broken bone that never gets set, a burn with an infection, an illness that leaves a rattle in the lungs. They don’t heal. Not really. 

James’ flat, bitter understanding is like a hot needle lancing an infection (haha _lance_ ) and it stabs right through the heart of him.

Lance leans forward until he can press his forehead against James’ knee. Doubled up with his chest pressed tight to his knees he almost feels like he can keep his metaphorical guts from spilling all over the floor. His breath catches in a rasping hitch that’s too close to a scream for comfort. It’s too much and not enough all at once.

“I miss her so fucking much,” he gasps around the sobs that rip out of his mouth. “So, so fucking much.”

James drops a heavy hand onto the top of his head. “Yeah,” he says quiet and ragged. “Sorry man, but that doesn’t get better. You just have to learn to live around it.”

* * *

Pidge calls.

It’s so novel that surprise or shock or some other suitably stunned emotion has him hitting the accept button before either common sense or the overarching, endless exhaustion can stop him.

They stare at each other through the messy, broken screen like they haven’t seen each other in years. And maybe they haven’t. Time is a concept that slides away from him like a fish evading a net. 

“You look like shit,” Pidge says. 

Lance opens his mouth and then closes it with a frown. He’s not offended even though he’s got a vague sense that he ought to be. “Thanks?”

“Like,” Pidge continues as if he hadn’t said anything which is pretty standard for Pidge. “You look like shit even by normal people standards, not even by your standards. You look like double shit by your standards.”

Now Lance remembers why he lets all of his calls dump straight into the void of his messages. “Okay. Do you have a point that this conversational clown car is getting to, or are you here to make vague commentary that I could get from a quick trip to look in my bathroom mirror?”

“Hunk sent you all of Allura’s journals and you never said anything,” Pidge says all pissy and offended. 

Of course. Nothing can motivate Pidge into action quite like an implied slight against Hunk’s … whatever the fuck it is she thinks Lance has slighted. There’s something almost comforting in that consistency. 

“And?” 

Pidge opens her mouth and then closes it again on a frown. Lance considers hanging up. He hasn’t talked to her since before Shiro’s disastrous wedding and he honestly doesn’t see any point to talking to her now. 

“Did you get them?” Pidge asks. There’s an unnatural softness to her voice. It’s weird enough to jar him out of his apathy and resentment of the living. 

“Yeah.” He wants to be suspicious but the best he can manage is a flat sort of annoyance. 

“Did you read them?” Pidge’s interrogation is almost gentle. Like she knows she’s picking at the edges of a great festering wound. 

Lance makes an abortive gesture before dropping his hands into his lap. “No.”

“You should.” Lance starts to reach for the little button to end the call because he’s way too tired to deal with Pidge’s judgmental bullshit today. Or ever. “Wait! Wait, wait, wait!” Pidge waves her hands fast, like she’s frantic. Lance stops and frowns at her, annoyed and tired. Even on his best days Pidge is a trial for his patience, and now the entire idea of talking to her grates along his nerves like someone’s decided to take steel wool to the sensitive places right under his skin. “You should read them.”

Lance makes an aggravated noise. 

Pidge, honest to god, _fidgets_ like she’s nervous. It’s so surreal that Lance settles back into his chair to stare at her. 

“We couldn’t read them,” she waves her hands and starts talking faster when Lance glares at her, “I know, I know, I just thought she might have written something in there that’d be useful and not all, I don’t know, Altean alchemy bullshit. Wait!” Lance stops in mid-reach for the end call button again. Pidge rubs the back of her head like she’s sheepish. “Only I couldn’t read any of it. Not even through a translator. But maybe you could?”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you ab—”

Her voice cuts off when Lance snaps his hand through the air like he’s physically severing the connection. “She’s _dead_ ,” he snarls with more emotion than he’s felt in days, maybe weeks. Time is a tricky concept for him. “She’s dead,” he repeats, quieter as Pidge stares at him with wide eyes and a pale face, “and you’re still treating her like a, a, a fucking experiment.”

“I miss her too,” Pidge whispers and Lance suddenly can’t hold onto the anger. The flash of white-hot rage leeches away into an unhappy simmer of petulance that hums under his skin like a disease until all he can do is half-heartedly glare at her in his rumpled robe and sleep-messy hair. “I thought there might be something in there of her that....” Pidge’s voice trickles off and she shakes her head. “I thought there might be some way to bring her back.”

Lance blinks.

Of all the millions of things he’d thought Pidge would say about Allura or her journals or anything at all, this is…. This is not it.

“Bring her back?” In another lifetime Lance’d be embarrassed at the way his voice shakes. Hope is a foreign concept. Fuck, it’s a whole ass foreign land that he’s only ever heard about but never visited at this point. “What do you mean, bring her back?”

Pidge’s face does something complicated that he doesn’t understand and then she sighs. He watches, struck mute, as she pulls off her glasses and rubs at her eyes. He thinks there might be tears. He waits as she carefully composes herself. It’s a whole little ritual he’s not sure he’s ever seen her do before. She smooths back her hair, rubs her eyes—first the left, then the right, with a thumb rubbing along under her eye socket like she’s removing old eyeliner—and puts her glasses back on. Then she adjusts her collar before opening her eyes again.

They both wait as she breathes out a slow, slow breath.

“So,” Pidge says all quiet and serious and more hopeful than Lance has ever let himself be, “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Altean alchemy and multi-dimension phase shifting.”

* * *

It goes like this:

Pidge is a fucking genius and refuses to take no for an answer about anything.

Even death.

* * *

He knows he’s dreaming even before he opens his eyes.

She’s leaning over him where he lays spread out across the bottom of his abuelo’s boat. Her hair drips sea water into his mouth, along the sides of his face like tears. She looks annoyed.

“I can’t save this again,” she tells him as she presses a journal against his chest. “I can’t rescue you again.”

Lance reaches up to wrap a hand around her wrist. She’s so slender. He never realized just how skinny she is until she’s leaning over him with her shirt gaping open. You could play her collarbones like brown marimba. He wonders if she’s been eating, if she needs to, or if she exists in this liminal place like a fever dream. He can feel the small bones in her wrist move as she shifts. He wants to draw her down and press his mouth against her salt-dusted skin and lick the taste of the ocean out of her mouth.

“You don’t have to,” he tells her as the dream flickers around them, starting to collapse in on itself as he becomes aware. “I’m going to find you.”

She looks at him, eyes very bright as the storm crashes down around them, her mouth moving around the syllables of his name.

* * *

He comes awake one a gasp, and then, slowly he turns his head to consider his desk.

There’s a stack of journals sitting on his desk like the most malevolent pile of paper and leather—or whatever the fuck the space equivalent is for cured cow hide—exactly where he’s left them for a solid week and half. They sit there still, somehow reproachful even though they’re just a pile of inanimate objects. Lance stares at them until he manages to scrape together what’s left of his executive function to stagger out of bed and pull the first one open.

He has to get up and walk around the room at the first look at her elegant, rounded handwriting. Fists his hands in his own hair and paces back and forth, breathing too hard as he fights the urge to scream until his vocal cords give out. Eventually he plants himself in his chair even as his breath comes too quick and too jagged, dragging out of his chest with painful exhales, and forces himself to read.

‘ _I have awoken to a new time and place_ ,’ Lance reads even as his vision goes tear hazy, ‘ _and met the new Paladins of Voltron. I am not impressed._ ”

Lance puts his head down against the paper that, through some trick of his senses, still smells like her and laughs until Coran comes and finds him, worried about the racket.

* * *

He keeps ignoring his calls and messages even though Pidge, rather creatively, threatens to find a way to send him a dimension hopping carrier pigeon if he doesn’t start answering her messages like a reasonable adult.

(Lance has absolutely no idea where Pidge got the idea that he’s anything remotely like an adult, much less a reasonable one.)

There’s a limit to the amount of social interaction he can tolerate these days. A limit that is quickly exceeded by Pidge’s tendency to go off on hyperactive rants regarding space time and folded universes. He’s pretty sure she’s spending more time with Slav that is probably good for anyone. Regardless. He can only deal with Pidge’s relentless hope and aggressive optimism for so long. 

About, he thinks, fifteen minutes every two weeks.

Eventually he unburies himself from Allura’s journals and his own endless angst to send Keith a quick, horribly awkward, message. An apology if you look at it sideways and squint. Lance isn’t sure if it’s even to the right address, though Coran swears up and down that it is. He stares at it for a solid one hundred and eighty seconds of uncertainty before hitting the send button. He’s pretty sure this is the first time he’s willingly extended a line of communication to his former teammate. The thought sits oddly.

He pops his head out of his room, leaning over the threshold with one hand wrapped around the doorjamb so he can shout down the hallway. 

“Coran?” He waits until Coran makes an affirmative noise from the depths of the house. “Am I friends with Keith?”

There’s a long pause and then Coran sticks his head out of the kitchen to look at Lance. There’s something going on in Coran’s expression that Lance pretends he can’t read because it makes him feel about five years old and kind guilty. 

“Yes,” Coran says gently. “You are.”

Lance pulls himself back into his room and stares at the far wall.

“Huh,” he says to himself. “When did that happen?”

* * *

He calls James. 

They stare at each other the staticky connection until James tips his head to the side, thoughtful. “So,” he drawls, all obnoxiously knowing. “Decided to return to the land of the living?”

Lance shrugs. “Well,” he says. “Since you asked so nicely.”

* * *

Lance doesn’t know what kind of bureaucratic voodoo James does, but he finds himself on a mission with one Ryan Kinkade some indeterminant amount of time later. 

He’s pretty sure he didn’t agree to running missions with the MFE team. Not even as a free agent. (A very, very well-paid free agent. This mercenary thing is a good gig.) But James Griffin is not a man who is used to being told no.

He tells Coran that he’s not a paladin anymore as Coran bustles around the house pleased as seven kinds of punch. Coran pats his cheek and coos. Tells him to watch for rifle jams and shows him how to garrote someone with a razor wire and not rip up his hands. (Which. What?) Lance feels a little like he’s being packed off to pre-school except instead of lunch, Coran packs him extra ammo and makes him repeat his extraction coordinates until he can all but sing them in the same singsong he used to repeat his home phone number. 

He tells Pidge he’s not a paladin anymore as she gives him the mission briefing and she rolls her eyes at him. She pats his cheek (what the fuck?) and tells him to not die.

He tells his sister that he’s not a paladin anymore and she just snorts, amused, and says that’s good because magic weapons make for sloppy soldiers.

He’s about to tell Ryan Kinkade that he’s not a paladin anymore but Ryan steps onto their transmat shuttle all tall and dark and way more handsome than any human being has the right to be in heavy tactical gear and the words just dry up in his mouth like dust. 

“Hi,” he says. “I don’t have a bayard anymore.”

Fucking. 

_Agh._

Dumb fucking mouth determined to make him into an idiot. 

Godsfuckingdammit.

Ryan smiles. The expression is slow and arrogant and oh fuck his entire life Ryan Kinkade is _hot_. Lance isn’t sure how he feels about noticing exactly how hot Ryan is, but he does and apparently, he’s determined to make a total fucking idiot out of himself because of it. 

“That’s fine,” Ryan says. “The bayard isn’t what made you an excellent sniper.”

If Lance trips over his own damned feet trying to get out of the transmat and into the drop zone, Ryan is gracious enough not to say anything.

* * *

There’s someone sitting on his legs. Again.

Lance never thought he’d feel so relieved to feel someone pinning him down and glaring at him as he does in this very second. He grabs a pillow and makes a big production of groaning into it, so his smile doesn’t show.

“Keith,” he grumbles. “What the entire fuck?”

“So, you won’t come be a translator for the Blade,” Keith says like it’s not three in the morning on a Sunday. “But you’ll go play sniper and get shot at for the MFE team?” Keith yanks his pillow away to glare at him. “What the fuck is right.”

Lance stares up at Keith with the vague awareness that he’s grinning wide enough that his dimples are showing as Keith tries his level best to glare back at him. There’s an answering grin lurking around the edges of Keith’s expression. They’re _friends_. When the hell did that happen? Who authorized that? He hits Keith with a different pillow on general principles.

Keith tries to smother him with the pillow he stole until he knees Lance right in the gunshot wound and Lance yelps. He hadn’t meant to get shot. (James had been _deeply_ sarcastic about the entire getting shot thing and made threats about shrinks that’d been just unkind.) But he’d been out of practice and sloppy. Keith backs up, contrite. His hands flutter to Lance’s side like he’s afraid to touch.

“Did he break you?” Keith demands. Something very like naked worry rides in his tone. “I told him he wasn’t allowed to borrow you if he broke you.”

That’s a … whole bunch of things shoved into one statement that Lance doesn’t quite know how to parse. He feels like he’s got a couple pieces of a puzzle, but they’re all sky. 

Lance opens his mouth and then closes it as he considers his options. “Jamie threatened me with shrinks.”

“Good,” Keith says decisively. “Wait. _Jamie?_ ”

* * *

Curtis calls him when the gunshot wound is getting to the itchy stages of healing. (There’d been a day when both Keith _and_ Jamie’d shown up to fuss at him and then spent the entire day yelling at each other instead. Shit’d been hilarious and honestly the best day of Lance’s entire month.) He hits the accept button and drops onto the edge of his bed as he towels his hair dry with one hand.

“Hi Janice,” he says as Curtis’ face swims into view over the erratic video feed. “You need to leave him.”

Curtis’s face does that thing where he tries to smile and frown with his eyes all at the same time and then sighs. “I don’t know why I was worried about you,” he complains. “Clearly you’re fine.”

“A little, uh, shot?” Lance says with a questioning lilt to try to make it sound less bad. Curtis makes a face like there’s no way to make that statement less bad. Which. Fair. “But you only need one kidney, right?”

There’s a brief pause while Curtis looks pained and resigned. Lance wishes he didn’t know Curtis’ resigned face as well as he does. “That’s not funny coming from you,” Curtis says quietly. “Takashi commandeered all the mission briefs after you got shot. He was worried.”

Lance pulls the towel off his head because as much as he wants to be surprised by that, he really isn’t. Shiro’d always taken their safety as his personal responsibility and had taken any of them getting hurt hard. He folds his hands as he studies the stressed shape of Curtis’ mouth. There’d been a fight, Lance is pretty sure. He can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

“It wasn’t on purpose,” Lance says and Curtis’ eyes flicker for a moment. “I didn’t get shot on purpose. I’m just,” he makes a vague gesture, “out of practice and sloppy.”

Curtis nods without quite looking at him. “I didn’t think you had.”

“You are a terrible liar, Curtis Adama,” Lance tells him because it’s true, but he’s gentle about it. Curtis frowns at him. “Hey, tell Shiro,” Lance pauses as he hunts for the words, “tell him I’m getting better. I’m not there yet, but … better.”

“That’s good,” Curtis says so softly that Lance knows without a doubt that Shiro isn’t getting better. Lance wants to tell him that it’s not Curtis’ fault, not his responsibility, but he knows now the expression someone wears when they absolutely aren’t gonna hear a word. 

“Jamie threatened me with shrinks,” he says instead of any of the things that he wants to say.

That makes Curtis laugh. “Good.” He blinks. “Wait. _Jamie?_ ”

* * *

Slow, heavy clapping fills Lance’s room and he stares blankly at the ceiling wondering why Johnny Cash is telling him that he needs to go tell that long-tongued liar, that midnight rider that God’s gonna cut them down. Eventually something in the back of his mind kicks him hard enough to remind him that he’d thought it’d make a hilarious ringtone for Jamie.

(It is a hilarious ringtone. Point proven by the way Veronica’s face had scrunched up in horrified amusement the first time she’d heard it.)

He’s punching the ‘accept call’ button before his brain comes online, which is, in retrospect, his first mistake. In his defense, somewhere between that first mission Jamie’d conned him into and the present moment, Lance’d become hardwired to accept all incoming calls from one James Griffin with a degree of promptness hitherto unknown to Lance-kind. James gets sarcastic about being sent to voicemail. No one needs that much sarcasm in their lives. No one.

“’ylo?” he slurs because it’s some kind of oh-god-too-early in the morning and he only found his bed maybe an hour ago. Lance isn’t sure when, but at some point in the recent months he’s run out of hours in the day. He can remember when time seemed to move as slow as old people fucking, but now everything seems shoved too close together and he can never get time to breathe, much less contemplate all of his terrible life choices. Starting with ever agreeing to be James Griffin’s favorite stick to beat difficult problems with. 

“Serrano,” James’ voice comes across crystal clear in its annoyance. Lance doesn’t hit the video button because like fuck did anyone need to see his unshowered, sleep-messed state. Lance has _some_ standards. Thank you. “What the fuck have you been doing?”

Is this a pop-quiz? Why is he getting asked these stupid questions? Did the last mission go sideways when he wasn’t looking?

Lance yawns so broadly his jaw pops loudly enough for Jamie to hear it over the line and complain.

“Well,” he says with his voice still a sleep slurred mess of vowels, “’bout an hour ago I was hitting some dude in the face with a plank all strenuous like. Jamie, go away,” he whines. “My life is hard, and I never get to sleep in.”

James snorts hard enough that Lance feels like he should be able to feel it over whatever intergalactic radio waves the Holt wonder twins had rigged to send secured communications.

“A couple of months ago you spent all of your time in your bed wasting away like a stage four cancer patient,” James barks. “Don’t give me that.”

Lance curls into his blankets and glowers balefully at his communicator. He contemplates turning on the video function so he can glower balefully at James’ digital face, but James has a way better glower than he does, so he’d probably lose that particular exchange.

“Jamie. Why are you calling and harassing me?” He continues to whine. “I’ve been a good boy.”

“You have never been any definition of good in your entire life, Serrano,” James says, but there’s that funny lilt to his vowels that says he’s teasing. “And that’s exactly what I want to talk about. This whole ‘Jamie’ thing.”

The distaste in Jamie’s voice is so strong that Lance can’t help but snicker.

“Aw,” he coos, “you don’t like your nickname? It’s a sign of my love and affection. You should cherish it.”

“You didn’t give Keith a nickname.”

“I don’t love Keith the way I love you.” Also, Lance is almost ninety-nine percent positive that if he tried to give Keith a permanent nickname, he’d get stabbed. He hates getting stabbed. Being stabbed sucks. 

James makes a disbelieving sound and hangs up.

Lance rolls over, punches his pillow into a more comfortable shape, and tries not to think about how James is gonna make him pay for his transgressions.

* * *

Veronica calls him at a reasonable time with a grin lurking around the edges of her face even as she tries to be somber and serious because she likes Coran to think she’s the responsible one. Lance is immediately suspicious. He knows that look. That look means nothing good for innocent and sweet little brothers who have never done anything wrong in their lives.

“What do you want?” Lance is a firm believer in the philosophy that a good defense is a strong offense and to never let your older siblings think you trust them. Ever.

“Perhaps I just want to talk to my favorite little brother?” Veronica says sweetly. There might be a flutter of eyelashes. Coran snorts. Lance narrows his eyes.

“At the risk of sounding like a trope: I’m your _only_ little brother,” Lance ripostes. Veronica’s smile broadens out into an honest to the gods grin. Her dimples flash. It is very alarming.

“It’s nothing bad.” Lance tries to narrow his eyes even further but finds the only way to do that would be to actually close them. Coran makes a sound that’s suspiciously like a snicker and Lance feels betrayed. Veronica keeps grinning at him. “Just as simple request for information.”

“Like hell.”

She holds up a tablet and waggles it at him. “I could just let this mission request go through.”

Lance has a sudden premonition and it’s all bad. “No!”

Veronica lowers the tablet, smug. “Oh. Now you want to play ball.”

“I don’t trust you,” he announces with a finger waggle at the screen because it’s good to be clear about this kind of thing. “I don’t trust you even a little bit. But I trust Jamie even less.”

Veronica props her elbows up on the table and steeples her fingers in a way that she thinks makes her look clever and Lance maintains makes her look like an evil archvillain out of bad anime. “Ah. So, you were the one.”

“The one what?”

Coran is definitely laughing at the both of them now, but Lance can’t focus on this betrayal because Veronica’s smiling at him all sweet and amused and affectionate and that generally means bad things for his immediate future.

“You’re the one responsible for James’ new nickname,” she says with an amount of self-satisfaction that he really doesn’t understand.

“Jamie?” He asks, baffled. “What about it? It’s cute.”

“He hates it,” she says succinctly. “He put in a mission request to send you to the Nith System, planet Vard specifically to deal with squatters in a quintessence refinery.” She waves the file again; there’s a little frown Lance is pretty sure she’s completely unaware of marring her brow. “It’s in the middle of the demilitarized zone, so technically neither the Garrison nor the Voltron Coalition can deal with it in a formal capacity.”

Jamie’s mind tends to work in shifty side-angles to things. He never comes at something straight on if he can take it out from a blind spot, ideally hitting two birds with one stone while he’s at it. Lance can almost see how the situation looks to his twisty Lieutenant: send Lance as punishment for the nickname, get under Keith’s skin by stealing a mission that should be the Blades’ by rights, solve a lingering problem from the war, and probably net a nice little commendation for exemplary planning. Lance sighs. Jamie is sometimes too cunning for his own good.

“Let it go through,” he says with an even heavier sigh.

Veronica’s eyebrows wing towards her hairline.

He waves a hand at her. “You’re making your stressed-out face. So, it’s important and you’ll feel less stressed if I handle it. And besides, it’ll make Jamie feel like he’s gotten back at me for the nickname, so he doesn’t do something … more inventive.”

“You’re sure?” Veronica asks with a little head tilt. She’s wearing her proud older sister face, like he’s done something mature and grown up. Lance isn’t sure what, exactly, but whatever. If she wants to look at him like that, he’s not gonna complain.

“Yeah,” he shrugs. “How bad can it be?”

At that Coran starts laughing so hard he has to put his head against the kitchen table to contain the wheezing.

* * *

Answer: bad. Very bad.

Why did no one tell him Vard is an ice planet? That seems like a critical piece of information. He’s been lied to. Manipulated. Played for a fucking fool by both Jamie and his sister and he’s going to get his revenge, oh yes, he is. 

Lance hates being cold more than he hates pistachio ice cream and the way Keith cheats every time they spar. (“It’s not tournament rules, cheat back,” his entire left _ass cheek_. Half the time Lance can barely remember how to handle a damned Altean broadsword because who the fuck uses two feet of sharpened steel to kill people anymore when you can just fucking shoot them? The Blades of motherfucking Marmora, that’s who, because they are anachronistic secret society with pretensions. Okay, he’s getting distracted.) And right now, he’s so cold his nuts are trying to climb back inside his body like he’s going through puberty in reverse.

“When we get back,” he announces, scowling as his breath curls like smoke in the air, “I am going to shoot Jamie, and no one will blame me.”

“Court martial,” Ryan says next to him. 

The little camp of squatters shifts in its configuration. Not quite the shift that they’re out here in the dark and fucking cold waiting for, but a shift. Soon, Lance thinks, the shot will come soon. 

He shimmies a little, settling a little deeper into their nest, as he scans the tents and makeshift habs. Ryan’s a solid, warm weight all long his left side and Lance has to bite down his lip to keep from snuggling in close. He wants to, though. He really, really wants to.

“Technically,” he whispers, if his voice is hoarse, he can blame it on the cold, “I’m a free-lancer. I can’t be court martialed.”

Ryan makes a soft noise in the dark. Just a low murmur of acknowledgement and a traitorous part of Lance’s brain sits up and wonders like an asshole what other sounds Ryan could make in the dark. As soon as he thinks it, his mind skitters away from the thought like a startled spider. His chest feels too tight, like he’s nursing a broken rib or a punctured lung. He can’t seem to breathe right.

“Here,” Ryan says, and shifts. Lance blinks at him dumbly. He knows his breathing is starting to trend into panic attack territory, and he hasn’t had one of those in months, but there’s no judgement on Ryan’s face. Ryan just holds up the edge of his camo-net. “Cold,” Ryan says with a gentle sort of coaxing twining through his tone, “right?”

Lance nods, suddenly struck mute. Ryan holds the edge of the net up a little higher and Lance can see the heat escaping. If he doesn’t move quick, Ryan’s gonna freeze. Lance opens the edge of his own net and slides over until he’s pressed in tight against that firm body. There’s some shifting around that Lance is both way too aware of and yet utterly unable to actually follow because the heavy weight of Ryan’s body all around him drives every rational thought right out of his head. Ryan gets both their nets aligned and sealed through pure fucking magic. He sighs, all involuntary, as warmth starts tingling around his extremities.

Ryan settles in against and, kind of … on top of him? 

Lance tries not to think about that too hard.

“Better?” Ryan asks right against Lance’s ear. There’s a tiny gap between his chameleon armor and his tactical optics and he can feel Ryan’s breath brush against the sensitive skin there. He nods, jerky as his mind and body try to get on the same page. “Good.”

Lance lets out a slow breath. “At least my dick isn’t gonna freeze and fall off anymore,” he mutters. “That’s good.”

He can feel the way Ryan’s body shakes with his contained laughter. Shit. 

“That’s good,” Ryan agrees softly.

* * *

Jamie’s waiting for them when their extraction transport touches down at some ass-backward rebel base. The propulsion jets make his hair flip around ridiculously and Lance can feel Ryan huff a muted laugh against his back. Apparently agreeing to share a camo net had been some sort of tactic agreement to be touched. Lance … doesn’t hate it. His brain kinda shorts out every time Ryan presses in close, dropping an arm around his shoulders and leaning in heavy, but he doesn’t hate it.

He has to remind himself how to breath when Ryan leans around him to flip Jamie off.

James just laughs.

That gets Lance moving again. He stomps up to Jamie and glares. “I nearly froze my nuts off, you sadistic asshole,” he snaps. “Why didn’t anyone tell me Vard is an ice planet?”

James arches one eyebrow at him and then, for reasons Lance can’t guess at, looks past him to Ryan. There’s a certain smug amusement curling around the corners of his expression. “Have fun?” James asks in tone that suggests he is _very_ pleased with himself. “Enjoy your little trip?”

Ryan sighs, says, “Stop helping, Jamie,” and punches James in the shoulder hard enough to make him wince even as he laughs.

* * *

“He’s _very_ handsome,” she says.

She laughs at him when he sputters.

The water around them glows softly in the moonlight—blue and silver and glinting along the sharp edge of her cheek. The moons hang overhead, four of them distant and fat along the horizon, and they light up the still ocean with quiet luminescence. He dives under the water to catch her ankles and drag her down. She kicks at him until he lets go. They surface laughing, her hair spreading out behind her like a cape. Locks of her hair move with the little waves like the tendrils of some sea flower, gentle and flowing. 

He loves her so much he feels like the emotion could drown him.

“I miss you,” he tells her.

The waves start to move around them, growing in size. He struggles against the grip of the tide, hand outstretched to catch her. “I’ll always miss you.”

Her shadow slithers out beyond her, a great inky stain across the water, and the waves surge. It sweeps towards the storm clouds above them like a great malevolent bat, a smear of smoking darkness shot through with purple veins. The waves swamp him. He comes up sputter, disbelieving as the shadow rears above them and opens its eyes, an ugly purple glowing in the dark.

Her voice shouting his name is the last thing he hears as the tide catches him in an iron grasp and pulls him into the dark.

* * *

He wakes up with a shout dying in his throat and his arm moving on reflex, arm swinging around in a barely coordinated flail, as his brain slowly comes online. There’s a little _woof_ of breath above him as his pillow makes contact and then a soft, rasping laugh. The weight across his legs barely moves.

“Why can’t you call like a civilized person?” Lance whines into the darkness. “Why?”

“Because before you wouldn’t answer,” Keith says like this justifies anything about anything. “And if I didn’t ambush you, you’d hide.”

Lance grabs his pillow and presses it against his face as he groans in complaint. “That doesn’t explain why you have to keep doing it,” he points out without moving his pillow. “You can call like a civilized person now. I answer my calls.”

(Mostly. There’s still a long list of callers that he just kinda watches go to notifications with a squirming, unhappy feeling in his gut.)

Keith makes a noncommittal noise and Lance can feel him shrug. Lance pulls the pillow off his face enough to glower up at Keith. “It’s habit now,” Keith offers. “I guess?”

“You’re an asshole,” Lance grumbles. “Everyone I know is an asshole.”

Keith gets a look on his face that seems entirely too sly to belong to one Keith Kogane, semi-feral savior of the universe who’d been raised by desert coyotes. “Not Ryan.”

Lance goes back to pressing his pillow into his face and groaning. The Ryan thing is a whole ass mess of emotions he’s not prepared to look at too closely. Keith yanks the pillow away, holding it up over his head when Lance tries to grab it back. He’s got an unusually serious expression on his face, the one he wears when he’s about to breach a topic he thinks is gonna get him punched. Lance doesn’t know when he learned to read Keith’s expressions, but he’s got them pretty down now. 

The mood goes weirdly somber as they consider each other. Lance’s learned to just wait when Keith starts wearing that look. Before Lance’d wait because he just flat out didn’t have the energy to do anything else. He’d become still and quiet out of exhaustion and apathy and pain, and in that stillness Keith had learned how to talk to him. It’s not the worst thing to come out of his months long—year long (?)—slide into grief fueled depression. 

Stillness is a new talent, but it’s not the worst one he’s ever learned.

“You’re allowed,” Keith starts and then his voice breaks. Lance waits some more as Keith coughs, looks away, and swallows hard before he tries again. Small muscles in Keith’s jaw work as he thinks. “You’re allowed to, um, to like other people,” he says softly. Lance thinks this is maybe a thing Keith is repeating. A piece of wisdom he doesn’t really believe for himself but is willing to extend to Lance like a gift. Like an absolution. “You can fall in love with other people.”

Lance drums his fingers against Keith’s thighs. He’s aware, distantly, that if this was anyone else, the position would be suggestive. At the very least, it’d be embarrassing. But Keith’s seen him at his worst. Muscled his way in while Lance’d been doing his level best to lay down and just die out of spite and resentment that he’s still alive while she’s not. Lance doesn’t think there’s anyway for them to be embarrassed around each other after that. Not anymore.

“I don’t want to,” he says quietly. “I don’t want it.”

Keith looks down at him. The ache that lives in Lance’s mitochondria has a twin in the ache that’s carved itself into the spaces between Keith’s ribs. Keith quirks a crooked smile at him. Sad and rueful. “Yeah,” he says. “Me either.”

* * *

A couple months into becoming James and Keith’s favorite toy to bicker over—seriously, they’ll snipe at each other over _anything_ , it’s unreal—Lance finds something in Allura’s journals.

“Wait, move it over to the left a little,” Pidge demands as she all but smashes her face up against the screen. “What is that symbol in the bottom left quadrant?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Lance says as he turns the journal back around to peer at it. He flips a couple pages and holds up a different page. “But I think it’s related to this matrix here. It’s some sort of pre-Voltron quintessence … amplifier … refiner… do-hickey.”

“Nice technical term.”

“Thanks.”

Pidge sits back and rakes both hands through hair, so it stands up all over like she’s been electrocuted. 

“Are you sure she’s talking about pre-Voltron quintessence manipulation?” Pidge’s drumming her fingers over her desk in the way that means she’s thinking way too fast with way too many moving pieces for Lance to keep up with, so he doesn’t bother answering the question because any answer he’d give would just be a distraction. “Because I swear, I’ve seen that symbol in some of the weird bullshit Keith sends back from the druid labs the Blades’ve been raiding.”

Lance makes a face. “There are still druids around?”

“No,” Pidge shakes her but even she looks hunted at the idea of more crazy magic-using devotees to Haggar running around the universe. 

Druids are fucking _creepy_ , Lance’d like to have it noted, and should be banned on general principles. Those principles being ‘fuck’ and ‘no.’ 

“But their labs are still all over the place. The Blades have been the ones closing them down, since they’re the ones with Galra blood to get around the racial locks.” She pauses, eyes going dark for a moment. “Mostly.” Lance takes that to mean Matt’s been excising his Shiro-shaped angst by way of being extremely violent towards the remnants of order that had hurt his best friend so badly. Pidge shakes herself as if to wake herself from a nightmare. She frowns. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that symbol in, um, reports.”

That’s not ominous at all.

Pidge is so clever. She so clever all the godsdamned time even when she’s feeling weird and awkward because she looks at him with her head-cocked to the side and asks: “Do you think it’s a code?”

“Maybe?” Lance flips through a couple more pages. “But why the fuck would Allura write in _Galran_ if she’d been making a code?”

There’s a far away look on Pidge’s face that Lance doesn’t think he’s ever seen before. “I don’t know,” Pidge says quietly. “But sometimes I think she missed him and that made her feel guilty.”

For a moment Lance thinks Pidge means Lotor, which, yeah that’s a thing they all knew. Allura’d been charmed and betrayed and humiliated and thrown Lotor so far, he’d fucking _bounced_. But Pidge’s face is twisted up like she’s not sure of her analysis and Lotor is too easy a line from point A to point B for Pidge to be internally conflicted.

“Zarkon,” Lance means to ask but it comes out like a conclusion. The name drops between them like a rock into dark water. As soon as he says it sounds right. Pidge nods. He scrubs his face with both hands because _shit_ did his girl have more than a few issues. “Well,” he says slowly, “he was basically her uncle.”

Pidge sighs, all hard and heavy like she’s eighty rather than eighteen. “Sometimes she’d start to tell me stories, when she was explaining how things worked in the castle,” Pidge chews on her bottom lip for a moment, worrying at it, “and then she’d just,” Pidge waves her hands and then drops them, “stop in the middle. Just get up and walk out.”

“Yeah,” Lance sighs, because for all he loves her there are always going to be parts of Allura of Altea that are a mystery to him. He hopes, desperately, that he never figures all of her out. Not ever. “She did that to me sometimes, too.”

“She wrote in old High Altean,” Pidge says slowly, like she’s working something out with each word. Lance shuts up. He knows, now, when Pidge is doing something for his benefit and not her own. The entire thinking out loud thing? Yeah. That’s for Lance. “But the symbols she used, none of those are Altean?”

Lance nods. “Some of them are Olkari, but yeah, most of them I don’t recognize.” 

Pidge drums her fingers against the desk on a four time as she worries at her bottom lip. “How fast do you think you can learn Galran?”

“Why can’t you learn Galran?” Lance asks. It’s not a whine, he’s straight up confused. Now is not the time to be pussy footing around his supposed insecurities. Now is the time to figuring out as fast as possible to bring Allura home.

Pidge scowls, all scrunched up irritation. She mutters something that doesn’t quite make it across their scratchy connection. He raises his eyebrows at her until she heaves a sigh at him. “I’m _bad_ at it, okay? The entire language thing.” She meets his eyes for a second before going back to scowling at the desk. “Even with that bear—” what the fuck? What bear? “—chasing me around, I maybe learned how to say ‘hello’ in Altean and like the basics of the alphabet.” She makes an irritated gesture and scowls at him. “Six and half years of Spanish and the best I can do is ask where the library is.”

There’s a petulant little scowl on her face. Like she expects to receive a failing grade and is _so_ mad about it. It’s surprising. And cute. Lance can’t stop from teasing her, just a little. He blinks at her, all big-eyed innocence, and her scowl gets deeper. “But math is just another language?” He says in a parody of every middle school teacher he’s ever had. “Once you learn your first language, the rest of them get easier!”

Pidge swears at him. There are some phrases in there that Lance is pretty sure she’s picked up from Jamie—all rolling vowels, dirty invective, and impressive imagery. She sighs when he laughs at her. It makes him cracks up so hard he’s got to rest his forehead against his desk while he wheezes. When he finally gets himself back together Pidge’s watching him with a complicated little smile.

“What?” Lance rubs at his face. He better not have laugh-spit on himself because that’s just gross. “Something on my face?”

“Your face.”

“Not one of your better insults, Pidgeon,” Lance tells her as he scrubs at his face. “C minus and see me after class.”

She hiccups out a little laugh that sounds wet around the edges. When he looks back up, she’s scrubbing at her eyes like there’s something in them. “It’s been a while since I’ve heard you laugh,” she says, voice all squashed and shaky. “A really long time.”

“Yeah,” Lance says, helpless. He’s not sure he’s ever seen her really cry. Definitely not over him. “Sorry about that.”

Pidge glares at him, but with her glasses off her glare is a little left of center, right over his left shoulder. It’s so unlike her and cute that he kinda cracks up again. She scrubs at her eyes again with the heel of one hand. “Don’t apologize,” she says. Lance thinks she means to snap it, make it a demand, but it comes out more like a plea. “You don’t,” she seems to lose that sentence for a moment. She shakes her head and puts her glasses back on. “You don’t have to apologize for anything. I’m sorry that I took so long—”

“Nope,” Lance cuts in. “Nope. If I don’t get to apologize than neither do you. This is officially a no apology zone. And besides,” Lance can’t help is grimace. “You had other things,” (people), “to worry about.” Lance fidgets for a second. “Sorry for abandoning you to that.”

Shiro’s presence sits like a rock between them. Shiro and, judging by the way Pidge’s face twists up, Matt.

“They still fighting?” He asks softly.

Pidge snorts. The sound is angry and hurt. “That would require them to talk, first. Matt won’t even,” Pidge screws her eyes closed like the only way she can get the words out of her mouth is to not look at anyone while she says them. Like she’s spilling state secrets. “Matt won’t talk to or about Shiro. Won’t let even me talk to Shiro about _him_. Last time I told Shiro anything—and _fuck_ , it wasn’t even anything big! Just that he’s, you know, not dead and still running missions and still pissed off—Matt didn’t talk to me for a month until Keith pinned him down and, I don’t know, yelled at him—”

“Guilt trip,” Lance interjects because he’s pretty sure if he doesn’t stop the tidal wave of words, Pidge is gonna talk herself into a panic attack. She blinks at him, stunned into silence. “Keith doesn’t really yell? He just kinda,” Lance wobbles one hand side to side like it means anything, “sits on you and throws the mother of all guilt trips.”

Pidge hiccups. Drags in a deep breath, hiccups some more, and then says: “Really?”

“Like the universe’s angriest, deadliest setting hen.”

“Huh,” Pidge says. “He broods.”

Lance snickers. “He is our brooding, emo action hero.”

“I don’t think that’s what people mean when they call him brooding,” Pidge says. Her voice is still squashed up and shaky, but there’s a smile starting to lurk in the corners of her expression.

“They should,” Lance says stoutly. “He literally sits on people and fusses.” Lance makes the ‘ta-da’ gesture. “Setting hen.”

“I’m telling him you said that,” Pidge announces. 

Lance flicks his fingers. “Whatever. I can take him.”

* * *

Spoiler alert: he cannot, in fact, take Keith.

“You take that back,” Keith hisses in his ear as he sits on Lance’s back, keeping him neatly pinned with one hand behind his back, chest to the floor. “I am not a, a, a,” Keith’s voice goes high with offense as he stutters, “a damned _chicken_.”

“I’m just saying,” Lance grunts as he scrambles for leverage. “There are some similarities.”

* * *

Lance starts keeping journals full of notes about Allura’s journals and feels like the biggest fucking nerd in the universe when he colour codes them. 

At first, he didn’t think that’d it take him too long to read through all of them. There’s only twelve of them. Slender, leather bound (or whatever the space equivalent is) things full of her elegant handwriting sliding across the page like she knew that they’d be preserved. He’s not sure what he expected her to record, thoughts and feelings, maybe. But the careful, meticulous alchemical theorizing had not been it. Military strategy. Notes on possible economic alliances between trade worlds marked ‘for later analysis’ that filled him with a nameless ache. Random doodles on the edges of the pages. Flowers and alchemical matrixes and funny little comics all smooshed together.

Some of the pages have odd crinkles to them, like someone’d sprinkled water all over them. He runs his thumb along them and tries to not think about Allura sitting in her too large bedroom, hair down around her shoulders, crying. 

(He thinks about it a lot.)

He sweet talks Coran into helping him set up a glass board. It takes up most of one wall, all shiny and precise in the way his thinking never is. Pidge makes fun of him over a scratchy video conference call (what the fuck was it with New Altea and their inability to get any sort of stable off-world signal? It drives him nuts sometimes) but helps him establish a system for organizing their notes as they work through Allura’s journals. They argue for three days straight over non-linear note systems the viability of Ishikawa diagrams before Lance sticks his nose in the air and tells her that it’s his damned room and his damned glass board so they’ll use his damned system. 

Pidge sulks like the teenaged girl she is until he lets her design the colour coding.

Red for military strategy, observations and plans. (They’d had a brief, but spirited argument over purple versus red, but the idea of purple = Galra = war made Keith pout at both of them until they changed it.)

Pink for Altean alchemy, Allura’s particular magical theorizing, and what Pidge charmingly categorizes as ‘miscellaneous physics-breaking magical bullshit.’

Blue for diplomatic notes, economic analysis, and what Coran’d cheerfully called: ‘ah, yes, Special Circumstances. Good old SC. I ran that.’ Lance has some questions about exactly how the Altean government had been run back in the day. Particularly since New Altea seems to function as mess of cooperative socio-anarchistic collectives nominally under the same banner, with all the boring but necessary bits of large-scale bureaucracy delegated to hyper-complicated artificial intelligences. 

(He thinks it’s telling of the species as a whole that currency continues to be one of those things that they’ll ‘get to’ while they had the entire public baths system up and running inside of a week. Alteans are a species with their priorities in order, he feels.)

Dark purple, the colour of a nasty bruise, for Haggar’s magic and druid bullshit in general.

There’s more of that dark purple on his board than he’d either like or had expected.

His girl had spent a lot of time worrying about Haggar in secret. Lance sits on the edge of his bed, staring at the expanding spiderweb of his notes, thumbing the edge of her druid magic journal, and frowning a lot. If they do ever get her back, Lance decides, no more secrets. No more hidden worries she’s too afraid to share. 

He thinks they may have literally eaten her alive.

* * *

Okay. 

So. 

Maybe after the disastrous sparing session of doom with Keith spitting in furious denial (not just a river!) about not being a not-so-secret secret mother hen in space ninja clothing, Lance spends a little more time than is strictly necessary looking up videos about animal husbandry. It’s for a good cause. He promises. Don’t look at him like that, the distrust is hurtful. It hurts his feeling. He’s only got the one and people should be careful with it.

Lance braces his shoulder against the wall of the elevator shaft he’s jammed into and shimmies around a little until he can get his communicator out with one hand. Ryan gives him a judgmental look. Lance ignores it with the aplomb that comes from long practice. He pulls up a video he’s saved of a girl giggling as a fat, fluffed up hen swears at her in chicken as it sits on a trio of adorable kittens.

 _is this u?_ he types out with one thumb and his tongue caught between his teeth.

Ryan sighs.

Which, okay, yeah maybe pausing in the middle of a very important sniper mission where they’re off to put an end to some rampaging Krogan warlord (one ‘Graken Forsan’ who’d gotten himself famous by executing a trader that’d introduced pyjaks to his homeworld, which Lance’d thought was kinda fair, honestly, having met a pyjak) to send Keith chicken videos isn’t the best use of his time. Funny though. 

The reply is immediate: _plz go die_.

Lance spends the rest of their mission snickering to himself softly.

* * *

“You want to go on a mission to clear out one of the druid bases,” James repeats, voice utterly flat.

Lance thinks about this for a second and then nods. Because, yep. Yep. That’s exactly what he wants to do. He’s pretty sure the only way that any of the shit he’s been reading in Allura’s journals is going to make any sort of sense to him is if he can actually stand in the middle of one of Haggar’s labs and _look_ at it. He doesn’t _like_ the idea, mind. But he’s not seeing any other solutions.

James eyes him narrowly. “Why aren’t you asking Keith?” He demands suspiciously. “The Blades normally handle all druid clean-up.”

Lance bites the inside of his mouth to keep from laughing because only Jamie could make raiding dangerous secret facilities previously operated by a bunch of crazy space-Nazis with a collective medical fetish sound like a grocery store display that needed tidying up. Lance shrugs his shoulders and makes a noncommittal noise. If he doesn’t say anything incriminating, Keith can’t come back and yell at him for it later. 

Probably.

James leans back in his seat and gives Lance a flat, suspicious glower he clearly learned from Lance’s sister. Lance really hopes that Jamie doesn’t bring in Veronica. That would not work out in his favor _at all_. 

“Lance,” James says all authoritative and disapproving. It’s the sort of tone that reaches into Lance’s hindbrain and smashes his ‘you have pissed off the authority figure, time to active the bullshit defenses’ button. Only Jamie knows how to read through Lance’s squid ink of bullshit. Lance squirms. “If I call up Keith right now, what would Keith tell me?”

A whole bunch of profanity, probably, and some insulting insinuations against Lance’s person in general and his sense of self-preservation in specific. He shrugs. 

“If I ask your sister what’s going on, what will she tell me?”

Lance can’t help the way he winces at that one. James makes note of it with a thoughtful little hum.

“And if I asked your partner-in-crime?”

Lance lifts both his eyebrows, surprised at the sudden conversational swerve. “Ryan?” Lance asks and Jamie’s face does something complicated. “You can totally ask Ryan.” 

Ryan’d lie for him, Lance thinks. Ryan’d totally lie for him.

“I meant Pidge, but noted,” Jamie says. There’s something smug lurking in his tone that Lance does not appreciate at all. 

“You can also ask Pidge,” Lance agrees as he tries to figure out what reason, exactly, Jamie has to be making smug faces at him. Maybe Keith’s right and smug is just Jamie’s default setting. 

James drums a little two-four-two cadence on his desk as he studies Lance. One day, Lance figures, Jamie is gonna be a really intimidating commander, but that day has not yet come. Lance smiles sweetly and waits.

“Pidge’d just look me straight in the face and lie to me like you’re doing now, wouldn’t she?” James asks.

Lance widens his eyes in a debutante’s parody of surprise. “Is that one of those rhetorical questions?”

James throws a file at him in what can only be called a petulant fit of irritation. Lance catches it one-handed with a laugh. 

James slouches in his chair in a manner that it is decidedly not military standard and frowns. “Holt, the elder one with the impressive anger issues not the half-pint genius with a continued disregard for little things like security protocols, has an op scheduled to hit the lab you want,” James says. He rubs his mouth with one hand, watching Lance like he thinks Lance is bluffing at poker. Lance blinks. “Try to avoid dying,” James sighs. “ Also try to avoid getting shot. I need Keith in here yelling at me like I need a hole in my head. Much less Ry—, well. There are people who’d be upset.”

“I always _try_ to avoid getting shot,” Lance defends. “I don’t plan it.”

James makes a little shooing gesture with one hand, but Lance hears James mutter as he’s sidling out the door: “Not anymore you don’t. Thank fuck.”

* * *

“So, you’re our tag-along for today,” Matt says by way of a greeting as Lance jogs up the long ramp into the rebel transport. “Explains why my darling sister was so hyperactive about this op.”

It’s been a while since Lance’s seen Matt. To the unobservant he looks the same, all long legs and lean strength with a really impressive mane of auburn hair barely contained in a braid. The other rebels move around him with an awed sort of deference. Like he’s the second coming of some kind of battle god.

Lance wonders if he’s supposed to salute, or maybe genuflect. 

There’s something hard in Matt’s expression, an ice living inside his eyes that makes him unapproachable. As touchable as the distant edge of a storm. Lance wonders, briefly, as Matt watches him make his suddenly awkward way into the belly of the transport unit if Shiro quite understands the damage he wreaks on other people. 

“I’ll try to stay out of your way,” Lance says, thoroughly unnerved by the flat, calculating look in Matt’s eyes.

The corners of Matt’s lip twitch like Lance’s said something funny. Matt cocks his head to the side, viciously amused. “Isn’t that the entire point of having a sniper?”

* * *

“Fuck.”

Matt’s bitten off curse is the only warning they get before the security alarms go off all around them—a blaring shriek of noise and an epilepsy inducing flickering of purple lights—and then life gets way more exciting than Lance’d really bargained for at ass-o’-clock in the morning.

He hauls himself into a ventilation vent on reflex. Shimmies up into the cramped space like he’s a hermit crab finding a new home, all awkward limbs and anxiety. The space is barely big enough for him and his FN-FNAR, but he makes it work.

“Serrano—”

“On it.”

The angle is awkward, but the sight lines are good. Two sentry drones go down in a sputtering fit of sparks even as Lance’s heart rate climbs into the stratosphere and he thinks he might really be flirting with a massive four-valve heart attack before he sees the far side of twenty-three.

He watches Matt take out a set of mechanical horrors with a hand canon that he drops in favor of his staff the second he runs through all his ammo. Lance clicks his tongue in irritation. What is it with these action hero-types and their caveman era tech? He shoots two drones right over Matt’s shoulders to prove his point. Matt doesn’t do anything as pointless as stop to glare up at him, but Lance gets the sense that he’d like to.

Serves him right, abandoning a perfectly good gun like that.

He ejects the spent rounds. Breathes out. Finds his next target on the exhale. He gets four more before the rifle jams and he spends thirty seconds swearing and sweating as he gets his shit shorted out.

“ _Serrano_.”

“Not dead.”

To prove it, he picks off a trio of sentry drones moving into Matt’s blind side. Matt doesn’t even twitch. Lance spends a useless one hundred- and eight-seconds watching Matt spin his staff in one hand, slam an end against the corrugated steel of the labs walls to ignite them in a flare of arc energy, and then rip through three drones as if they were standing still. The air hums, crackles like the edge of a storm. Arc energy sparking along the walls. Matt bares his teeth, feral. The shattered shells of sentries litter the floor at his feet like fallen leaves, and he pays them about as much mind as he stalks the darkness. 

Whatever boy genius Shiro’d sacrificed himself to protect is long dead now.

Lance shakes himself back into reality in time to pick off another sentry creeping along the wall like some kind of horrible mechanical spider.

He doesn’t see the sentry above his nest, clinging to the corner of the wall and ceiling like the universes’ most malevolent centipede, until it’s reaching into the vent with one multijointed arm to yank him out by his neck. Lance yelps, squalling like a scuffed kitten. He spreads out, fingers scrambling to find traction against the smooth walls of the vent, but it’s useless. The sentry holds him with an ease that’s just insulting. He’s insulted. 

Lance slams the butt of his rifle into the drone’s cranial casing for leverage and gets backhanded by the drone’s tertiary limb for his efforts. His vision swims. He can’t breathe around the way the sentry looms into the narrow shaft. The metal _clink_ of the sentry locking its claws around his FN-FNAR sets his ears ringing. There’s no way for his squishy, organic strength to resist quintessence powered robotics. His rifle goes flying who the fuck knows where. Distantly, he can hear Matt swear.

The sentry pops him out of his hidey-hole, swearing and furious, in a one-handed grip. 

He braces one foot against the rim of the vent, the other against the chest of the sentry, and leans against its hold as far as he can go, straining its grip on him. Lance gets his hand cannon, a nasty piece of work Ryan’d nicknamed ‘the last word,’ clear of his hip holster on instinct. Four shots. One for each nasty, glowing eyeball. The recoil rocks through his body like the aftershock of a jet hitting the sound barrier. He’s almost unaware of his sudden drop, a good six feet onto unforgiving steel, around the way his ears ring from sentry’s death scream.

Matt catches him before he hits bottom. “Focus.”

“A guy is just a little rusty,” He mutters, dazed and grumpy, as Matt sets him on his feet. 

The tell-tale clink and groan of sentries followed by the furious _ratta-tat-tat_ of the heavy kinetic weapons the rebels favor announce their new guests. Lance makes a face as Matt yanks him out of the way of blaster fire. Four shots, four dead drones, sparking and leaking fluid that looks a lot like the corrupted quintessence Lotor’d collected from the Colony. Not good.

“It’s like an ugly contest,” he tells Matt as he shoots three drones without looking at them, relying on long familiarity with the wheeze of their quintessence fueled hydraulics. They drop with a scream of rent metal. “And everyone’s a winner.”

Matt rolls his eyes.

“No one appreciates comedic timing anymore,” Lance complains to a sentry climbing along the high vaulted ceiling. He shoots it almost lazily. “It’s tragic testament to our fallen times.”

* * *

“So,” he drawls as he trots up to Matt after he calls the labs cleared. 

Matt quirks an eyebrow in a manner that’s uncomfortably reminiscent of Shiro. Lance spares a moment to wonder how much of Matt’s leadership style is borrowed and only slightly reformatted from a certain broad-shouldered hero of the universe. Lance’ll eat Blade MRIs for a month if Matt’s template is his father.

“So?” Matt echoes, drawing Lance back out of the mental rabbit hole he’d tumbled down.

Lance shakes his head, like a dog shedding water, before quirking an eyebrow himself. (Or trying to, at least. It doesn’t work. He’s never gotten the hang of the whole one-eyebrow thing, and instead his face does something approximating the muscle spasm right before an aneurism.) Matt huffs out a sound that might want to be a laugh when it grows up. Nice to know something of his sense of humor’s still living under all that pain and rage.

“If it’s not, like, state secrets or something,” Lance says just for the way it makes something amused slide into Matt’s expression. “Mind telling me just how much political capital you bought by letting me pretend today is ‘bring your child to work day’ and I’m the precocious but adorable tot?”

“Adorable?” Matt echoes, like he’s testing out the concept. “You?”

Lance beams at him, all sunshine and innocence.

Matt snorts and shakes his head. “Right.”

“I’m very adorable. Excuse you,” Lance chirps. He’s not sure why he’s pulling out his airhead routine for Matt, but there’s something unsettling about the hard edge riding all of Matt’s gestures. 

Matt looks away down the dark hallway with its flickering purple lights like he’s searching for something in the shifting gloom. Then he tips his head to the side and says in that faux-casual tone that most military commanders take when talking about political maneuvering they don’t like, “Well, it never hurts to have the most ambitious bastard in the Garrison owe you a favor.”

For a second Lance thinks Matt’s talking about Shiro, because no one can deny Shiro’s burning ambition for all he’s currently trying to pretend he’s safely retired. (No retired man spends as much time successfully back-seat driving Garrison operations as Takashi Shirogane. If it weren’t for Veronica’s boundless respect for the man, Lance has a bad feeling they’d’ve found his body cemented to the bottom of an ocean by now, nibbled on by little fishes.) Then reality, and all of Shiro’s inexplicable life choices, reasserts itself and he realizes Matt’s talking about _Jamie_.

Lance makes a face. “Having Jamie owe you favors is kinda like having the devil owe you one. Like, sure, he’ll come through in the end, but you probably won’t like how he does it.”

Matt laughs. It’s so like Pidge’s bark of startled amusement that Lance kinda grins in spite of himself. “He doesn’t like making things easy for people,” Matt observes dryly. “Does he?”

“I think he thinks that people don’t appreciate things unless they have to work for them,” Lance says as he trots after Matt. He mugs a thoughtful expression. “Also, Jamie is an asshole.” He nods seriously when Matt glances back at him over his shoulder, bemused. “That’s also a thing that Jamie is.”

“Then why are you friends with him?”

Lance shrugs expressively—a huge sweep of his shoulders up to his ears and back down. “Everyone I know is an asshole, why should I discriminate?”

That earns him another of those snorting laughs. “All right, hotshot,” Matt says as he gestures broadly at a bank of computers if they’d been designed by someone with an obsession with the colour purple and medical fetish. “What is it you’re out here on some wild goose chase looking for.”

It takes him a minute of awkward hopping around to pull one of Allura’s journals out of what he will forever think of as his ‘combat fanny pack’ and flip through it. “Just, uh, just give me a second,” he mutters. Matt kinda sighs at him when Lance pulls one of his gloves off with his teeth—which, yeah, yeah, bad combat protocol to remove armor when you’re still in zone but he can’t flip pages wearing that weird bastard lovechild of amino-silicate shielding and titanium silk. “One more second.”

Lance makes a little ‘ah-hah’ grunt and flips the journal around to show Matt the alchemical matrix Allura’d doodled on the edge of the page. 

“Huh,” Matt says as he takes the journal. 

Lance can’t tell if that’s the good ‘huh’ or the bad ‘huh’ and Matt doesn’t bother to elaborate as he turns away, muttering under his breath about conversion matrixes and nine-by-nine binary grids. Matt boots up one of the evil looking computers—totally ignoring the way it makes Lance squirm uncomfortably, which Lance feels is inconsiderate—and starts flipping through the directories. 

“This the only journal you brought with you?” Matt asks.

“Yeah,” Lance answers only slightly suspicious. “Why?”

“She ever draw anything that looks like this?” Matt asks, completely ignoring Lance’s suspicious posturing. Lance drops the act because why bother if he’s just gonna get ignored? And sidles up next to Matt.

A three-dimension image floats in holo-space of the druid mainframe. Lance makes a face. He knows that image, or at least it’s two-dimensional cousin. Allura’d scribbled it all over her notes about Oriande and the ‘white lion’ (the Altean word she’d used came dangerously close to ‘mythic bullshit creature’) and her angst about being the sacred Altean. Capital letters strongly implied and resented. 

“Yep,” Lance says shortly. “She did.”

“Great,” Matt says as he closes the journal and hands it back to Lance with a little snap and flourish. “Then you know where to go.”

Lance blinks at him, apparently doing the Morse code for distressed confusion with his face because Matt grins, claps him on the shoulder, and says, “She left you a map, hotshot.”

* * *

He’s walking down a pier.

The wood is warped under his feet, crusted with salt and rough from age and neglect. His hands pool with a blue-white light. He can feel it drip off his face like tears from his markings. It runs from his fingers in steady rivulets—heavy with power, streaking his skin like saltwater. It leaves little glowing footprints as he walks the length of the pier. In his hand is Allura’s spear, delicate and deadly. The filigree catches the eye, literally captures it, with endless fractals. It’s a witch-killing weapon and sits heavy in his hands.

The pier lengthens out in front of him endlessly, like a kaleidoscoping shot in a pretentious, artistic movie. 

There are two people standing on the end of the pier. One slender and silver. The other hunched and venomous.

Allura is there. She stands with her back to him, facing down a curved, wretched shadow that flickers endlessly between a great mutating smear of darkness and the bent, wizened form of every fairytale witch. He can hear the rise and fall of her voice, angry and afraid, as she castigates that unstable form. Calls it to task for every sin it refuses to regret. 

The air shivers around her, silver and pink like the light of a setting sun. He can see Allura’s breath on the ocean wind—curling out her mouth like smoke as if her lungs were a forge, a bellows, and with every exhale she breathes out heat and power. She doesn’t turn around to look at him even as his footsteps make the twisted boards of the pier creak and groan. She only has eyes for the shadow trapped on the end of the pier.

The shadow is Haggar, or what’s left of her.

He can feel the rot of her soul, driven mad by millennia upon millennia of being trapped between worlds, only the barest part of her capable of existing in their plane of existence. Alchemical symbols meant to bind the twisting power of the void so wrapped up in her own soul there’s no difference between the seething malevolence of the rift and Haggar’s madness. 

The shadow wearing Haggar’s form croons to Allura, sweet and sickening. Calls her sister, calls her daughter, calls her the lost twin of her own soul. 

Allura falters. It’s a half second hesitation, a single doubt. ( _She’s so lonely, has always been so aching lonely, and here now is a mentorsisterfriend—_ ) The shadow rears up, enormous, and the storm races down upon them.

Lance raises his hand, draws back his arm, light fills his vision like water filling a cup. Her name is a battle scream on his lips, and—

* * *

“My brother is either insane,” Pidge says as she squashes her face up against her side of the screen and scowls at the page of the journal that Lance holds against his side of the screen. “And idiot. Or being deliberately cryptic because he likes watching me run around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to decipher his nonsense.”

“I think,” Lance says slowly because he doesn’t even know where to begin with all of that, “that Matt thinks he’s being clear.”

Pidge sits back from the screen and snorts. “Ever since becoming one of the leaders of the rebels—and how can they still be rebels? There’s nothing left to rebel _against_ —”

“The man?” Lance offers. “The machine?”

“Stop helping,” Pidge tells him. The eyeroll he gets when he makes an exaggerated gesture for her to continue is _great_. “Anyway, no. My brother’s become pathologically vague.” She hooks two fingers through a holo-projection and waves it around some. “How the hell is this a map?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have come to you all sheepish with my hat in my hands: ‘please, Ms. Pidge, please, my children—'”

Pidge waves a hand at him. “This? This I did not miss.”

“Your brother sent me to you, actually,” Lance says, dropping the act. “He seemed to think you already had the other half of the riddle.”

“Riddle?”

Lance flips back a couple pages in a different journal and holds it up to the screen. He really wishes they could make digital copies of the journals, but somehow Allura’d had, like, magic password locked them or something, rendering any attempt to digitize them an incomprehensible mess of symbols that seethed and shifted like Cthulhu’d decided to have verbal diarrhea all over the screen. It’s the worst.

“Apparently, Allura’d decided that writing in code wasn’t secure enough and gave us a little puzzle to solve on top of everything else,” Lance explains. Pidge makes a face. He’s inclined to agree because, man, is he _bad_ at riddles. 

But. 

He thinks about Allura sitting at her desk, chewing on the end of her pen like she used to, twirling a lock of hair around a finger with that little ‘go away, I’m thinking’ frown hovering around the edges of her expression and his heart goes squashy with affection. The page is filled with her heavy-handed script, rough in the places where’d she crossed something out and tried again. It must’ve taken her ages. Words and symbols crossed out as she thought up the exact right thing to leave them as a breadcrumb. 

A pale little hand reaches down into the frame on Pidge’s end and taps her shoulder. 

Pidge turns, annoyed expression fading into interest. It’s like the sun coming out. She smiles, small and all unaware, at something off screen. There’s a quiet beat and then her hands fly through a series of signs like started birds. It’s surprisingly elegant. Lance props his chin up on his hand so he can hide his grin.

“Hi, Ina-bean!” He chirps when there’s a likely pause. Pidge jerks, startled, and a slow blush makes its way across the tops of her cheekbones. “How are you?”

Ina leans into the frame and does a little finger wave. Not one of her verbal days, then.

“Translate for me?” Lance asks Pidge, who just nods, still faintly pink. “Ina-bean, you’ve seen the journals?”

Ina nods. She’s not smiling, but she’s doing that calm, neutral stare that says without saying a word, _I’m listening. You have my attention_. He fights the urge to squirm. It can be rather a lot to have all of Ina’s attention at once. Lance wonders how Pidge manages it on the regular. 

“You’ve seen my translations?”

Ina nods again, serious. He thinks that Ina might be behind some of Pidge’s theorizing about why only Lance could read Allura’s journals without the words shifting around the page like demented spiders made of ink. 

“Okay, so,” Lance holds up the page he and Pidge’d been fighting with for the past hour or so, “Matt says this is map. Pidge says it’s a riddle. Opinions?”

Ina leans forward—right into Pidge’s space, who goes an immediate and brilliant red, eyes very wide—to peer at it. Then she turns, waits until she’s got Pidge’s attention, and starts to sign.

“A story?” Pidge asks. “How the hell can a series of alchemical matrixes that Allura’d scribbled on the edges of her journal be a story, a map, and a riddle all at once?”

The paths Ina’s hands make are graceful and exaggerated. Pidge scowls. “I _have_ been looking at the context,” she mutters. “What do you mean, context?”

Ina signs something. Pidge frowns and shakes her head. Ina signs again, this time with added emphasis. Pidge drops her head into her hands and groans. Ina pats her shoulder in a consoling manner before doing a little wave goodbye. Lance watches, bemused, as she slides out of the frame and, presumably, out of the room. Pidge stays curled into a little ball. He’s pretty sure it’s one-part performance, and two parts mortification over being caught near her crush. 

“Okay, want to explain to the class what all that’s about?” Lance asks. Because as much as he loves pantomime shows, he’d at least like to have the basic starting clues to figure out what the fuck is going on with the plot.

Pidge lifts her head out of her hands with the air of one facing a firing squad. She stares off into some unknown middle distance. “Ina reminded me of the fact that Galran is originally had a pictographic script, like the Egyptians, and that it wasn’t until they met the Alteans that they transliterated all of that into something like the Altean three-by-three grids of binary, so—”

Lance waves a hand. “Yeah, yeah, Altean corresponds to nine-bit wide binary so it can switch between mathematical and symbolic form. We’ve been through this.” 

Pidge’s screen fills up with Allura’s alchemical matrixes. “And what do these turn into, if you put them into the grids?”

Lance sighs. “A map.” He scrubs his face. “And when you translate that map back through the grids into Galran….”

“It turns into a riddle.”

“Which is a reference to a story,” Lance finishes. They regard each other with dismay. 

“I’m sorry you’re in love with a paranoid linguist who likes riddles,” Pidge says gently. “It must be a terrible burden.”

Lance hangs up on her out of general principles.

* * *

“I hate being cold.”

“I know.”

“Why does Jamie keep sending us here?” Lance demands. Even though he knows why Jamie keeps doing it. It’s because Jamie is an asshole and thinks its funny to send Lance to climates where he is manifestly unsuited. Everyone Lance knows is an asshole.

Ryan sighs, long and low and at least James sends Ryan with Lance every time he decides Lance needs to be reminded who writes his mission plans. “Jamie,” Ryan says with an impressively flat tone that suggests James has some comeuppance headed his direction, “thinks he’s helping.”

“Helping what?” Lance mutters. “My nuts freezing off? I am going to _die_ of hypothermia or some shit long before our mark ever shows up.”

Ryan says something too low for Lance to quite catch. Lance shifts, trying to find a warmer spot, and Ryan obligingly shifts to let him huddle up against Ryan’s bulk. Lance tries to avoid thinking about how they’re pretty much snuggling. 

He thinks about it a lot. 

“I really, really, _really_ hate being cold.”

“You may have mentioned. Once. Maybe twice.”

Lance scowls, burrows deeper into their shared little camo-net, and considers whining some more. The wind snaps long the outside of their enclosure, making the micro-OLID beads chime in tiny symphony. It’s so cold the fucking molecules of water in the _air_ freeze. What is with that? He’d thought Pidge’d been fucking with him when she’d chirped on about ‘ice fog,’ but no, nope. That’s a thing. A terrible, hellish thing that only went to prove his earlier point that no human being should exist in this sort of climate.

“I—”

A large hand fits itself over his mouth. Ryan shifts so Lance is pinned a little more securely underneath him and, uh, wow. _Wow_. Is that a whole line of thought that Lance is just gonna … stop thinking. Any time now.

“You’ve said,” Ryan whispers low in his ear and Lance considers the logistics of maybe just spontaneously combusting right on the spot. At least then he wouldn’t be cold. He maybe whimpers a little bit.

Ryan seems to take that as an indication of his ~~submission~~ (oh wow, _brain_ , no) agreement to calm down with the whining for a little bit and releases him. There’s a handful of heartbeats where Lance’s brain helpfully catalogues all the places where Ryan’s weight and heat seep into him despite the bitter cold howling all around their enclosure. Lance swallows heavily. Breathes out slowly. Ryan considers him a little longer—still large and heavy and pinning Lance to the ground—and nods.

“Good,” Ryan says quietly, like he’s a dog that just learned a new command. Lance is just … not gonna think about how that puts a bolt of heat straight through him.

“Sorry,” he whispers. Lance hopes that Ryan won’t notice the way his voice has gone husky and rough. He really needs to work on that whole ‘learn how to combust on command’ thing. 

Ryan shifts so Lance is pressed a little more securely against him. “Not much longer,” Ryan says, so close Lance can feel his breath against his skin. He has to close his eyes against the sensation. “Patience.”

He fights the urge to squirm. Every movement pushes him back against Ryan and it makes him just a little bit nuts. Ice planets are the _worst_. The air in their enclosure warms with their breath and body heat and Lance has to work to keep from thinking of all the other ways they could make enclosure hot and humid. 

Ryan settles next to him, placid as a glacier lake, as he keeps eyes on their target.

“Allura’s journals,” Ryan says suddenly, disrupting their quiet little nest and all of Lance’s guilty thoughts. There’s a thoughtful, hesitant edge to Ryan’s tone, like he doesn’t want to press or maybe just doesn’t know if it’s his place. 

Lance makes a small, interested sound and Ryan shifts against him again, moving away a bit. Lance mourns the loss of his weight. Dark eyes rake his face. There’s an edge to Ryan’s careful study—a sharpness in the way his eyes catalogue the set of Lance’s mouth, the line of Lance’s shoulders, the way Lance’s eyebrows wing up towards his hairline. Whatever he’s looking for, Ryan must find it because he nods again.

“Ever think about bring them to the Archivist?” Ryan continues like he hadn’t spent the last couple of minutes making Lance’s heart try to take up permanent residence in his mouth.

“The who?”

As soon as the question is out of his mouth, Lance winces. He knows who the Archivist is. Keith never stops whining about him and the way he gets on Keith’s case about his diction and the right way to conjugate the genitive case. 

“The head of Galra information technology.”

And that is the most diplomatically banal way of explaining the old man who’s some kind of hellish cross between a battle monk and a language teacher that’s actually been given the authority to shoot people for using the wrong declension. 

“You mean the Jean Chrétien of the Galra?” Lance asks. Ryan snorts, amused. “I’ve heard of him. And no, I hadn’t.”

“Think about it,” Ryan says, all confident and self-assured—there should be _rules_ against this sort of thing. “He’s been the cultural touchstone of the Galra for over a thousand years. If he doesn’t know how to solve the riddle your girl left you, no one will.”

Lance stares at him. “It’s not fair,” he whines while Ryan watches at him obviously bemused. Lance buries his head in his folded arms. “It’s not _fair_.”

“What?”

“That you are this hot and this smart,” Lance says and then immediately wishes he could snatch those words out of the air and stuff them right back in his mouth. He doesn’t look up. If he doesn’t look up, then Ryan can’t see the way he’s blushing like a fourteen-year-old confronted with their favorite pop idol. He’s sure that’ll work. Somehow. “Because that’s a really good idea.”

“Oh.” Lance looks up at Ryan’s soft tone. Ryan blinks at him, looking pleased and surprised like Lance complimenting him is a thing to get flustered over. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Lance says, dumbfounded.

* * *

“What?” Keith barks. “Why?”

“Because Ryan’s right,” Lance tells him even as their connection scratches and glitches. Seriously. New Altea has the worst coms connection to the wider universe. “We’ve been stuck trying to translate this mess for who the fuck knows too long and I’m pretty sure Ina-bean’s got the right of it. We’re missing context.”

Keith’s entire face scrunches up in an unhappy, defeated scowl. “Do I have to go?” And, wow, if it’d been anyone other than Keith Kogane, certifiable action hero, Lance’d say they were sniveling. “He _hates_ me.”

Lance brushes this off with a little finger flick. “Please. No one in the universe hates you.”

“That’s not true.”

The soft, hurt tone hurts something small around the edges of Lance’s heart. “Shiro doesn’t hate you either,” he says gently. Keith looks away, eyes bright. “He hates himself.”

Keith blows out a long breath. This is a conversation with no end and nothing more than the painful retreading of questions neither of them had any good answers for. Fortunately, neither of them are much for self-flagellation. Keith squares his shoulders, nods once, and then grimaces.

“The Archivist definitely hates me, though.”

“The Archivist hates that you speak Galran like cases don’t exist, neither do particles, and keep using Earth idioms.”

Keith tosses his hands into the air. “Galran has five genders and seventeen cases. No language needs seventeen cases! And I only use Earth terms when I can’t find the right one in Galran.” Keith looks mutinous. Like a five-year old that just got told to get off the swing set and go wash their hands. “The Archivist is just a pedantic asshole.

“Samurai,” Lance says with a sigh. “You told the last ambassador from Diabazal that the Garrison had ‘chamber-of-commerce-ed’ their proposed economic zone of interdependence.”

“Because they did!”

“That doesn’t even make sense in _English_! What the fuck does that even mean?”

Keith glares at him, but under the weight of Lance’s judgement he crumples. As he should. One of the two of them is a linguist, and it isn’t fucking Keith.

“Look,” Lance says in his most conciliatory tone. Keith looks at him with immediate suspicion, which is just hurtful. Lance doesn’t know why no one trusts him. He’s very trustworthy. “Just brush up on your verb conjugations and let me do most of the talking.”

Keith continues to look at him with that really hurtful amount of skepticism. If Lance had a more delicate ego, he’d be wounded. As it is, he’s immune to Keith’s disbelief. He waves one hand. “It’ll be fine.”

* * *

Things are not fine.

The Archivist is waiting for them when they land. There’s definitely something intimidating about the way he stands in the middle of the landing zone like no pilot would dare to do something as gauche as squash him with a heavy transport. Keith promptly hides behind Lance. Like, for real, that’s a thing he does. Squeaks like a startled kitten and ducks behind Lance like that’s gonna help him. Which it won’t, Lance’d like to point out, because the Archivist has a solid foot on him and at least fifty pounds. 

If the resident space ninja can’t take him, Lance sure as shit can’t.

He does his best to stand firm and not quall like a frightened field mouse that’s spotted a very large, very cranky owl when the old Galra stumps up to them. 

“So, you’re the one. The new Altean alchemist,” the Archivist mutters. Lance tries to side-eye Keith in annoyance, but the Archivist catches his chin between two claws and turns his face one way and then another, inspecting him. Lance thinks his marks might be glowing from the way the old man narrows his eyes thoughtfully. Keith squeaks out something in Galran. The old man rumbles out a low noise with only the faintest suggestion of words in an affirmative tone.

“Nice to meet you?” Lance tries in Galran. It comes out a mess of vowels and hard glottal stops that he’s sure is only barely recognizable. His spoken Galran is shit and he knows it. _Keith_ speaks better Galran than he does and Keith speaks it like he’d learned the language from a drunk narcoleptic. But Lance is here as a representative of New Altea, right? Right. Altean it is. “We thank you for your assistance,” he says in Altean with Galran inflection. The Archivist blinks. “And for the gift of your valuable time.”

The old man grunts. “Well,” he says in slow, creaking Altean. “At least you can be polite, unlike that mannerless kit hiding behind you.”

“Yeah,” Lance says, thoroughly bemused. “We’re working on that. I think he was raised by desert coyotes or something.”

Keith punches him right in the kidneys. 

Lance pulls away, hands clamped to his side like he’s been stabbed, and stares at Keith with wide, accusing eyes. Keith glares. The Archivist laughs at the pair of them like he’s watching a pair of gamboling puppies or some shit. Keith looks the old man like he’s never seen him in his entire life.

“If you don’t mind being separated from your,” the Archivist says a word in Galran that translates messily into ‘year-mate’ or ‘cohort (singular)’ or ‘brother’ that has Keith looking like he’s sucking on lemons, “one of the scribes will take you to the lower stacks.”

“That would be appreciated,” Lance says in as polite a form of Altean as he knows how. The Archivist’s ears twitch like he’s done something clever.

“And you,” the Archivist’s clawed hand snaps out with a speed that defies his age to grab Keith by the nape of his neck, “you will come with me.”

Keith squirms in his grip, eyes going Galra feral, and growls something that Lance is pretty sure is extremely rude. The Archivist shakes him like he’s a misbehaving kitten and not, you know, a former Paladin of Voltron and current space ninja badass. It’s _hilarious_. Lance isn’t entirely sure what he’s done to deserve seeing this, but he is so, so grateful. Keith catches him watching—and probably grinning like a concussed loon—and spits out another one of those rude Galran terms that has the Archivist shaking him again.

“Doesn’t do any good to swear at me, samurai,” Lance tells him cheerfully, “when I don’t understand a single word you’re saying.”

“I’ll translate, you fuckin— _urk_ ”

“You will not use such language on sacred grounds,” the Archivist says sternly as he shakes Keith. “Were you raised in a breeding den? This is the reason that the,” the Archivist says a word that Lance thinks means ‘seminary’ but also thinks he might be experiencing a catastrophic language failure, “was founded, what Zarkon was thinking abolishing it, I will never know. Do not try to _bite_ me, mannerless brat. I will speak to Kolivan about this.”

Lance watches as the Archivist stalks off, Keith firmly gripped in one massive paw, still ranting and occasionally shaking the erstwhile savior of the known universe by the scruff of his neck. 

This is, hands down, the best day of Lance’s entire fucking life.

* * *

He’s halfway puzzling through what seems to be a cross between fairytale, a Shakespearean tragedy, and one of his abuela’s soaps when Keith comes barreling into the long hall housing researchers. A line of little academic heads pop up like meercats sensing trouble. Keith skids to a stop, looks around, and then dives under Lance’s table. This is. Not what Lance’d been expecting his day to contain. Not even a little.

“Dude,” Lance hisses as he peers under the table. “What the fuck?”

“Hide me!”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a super stealthy ninja or some shit?” Lance demands. “How am I supposed to hide you?”

Keith punches his thigh right above his knee hard enough to give him the mother of all Charlie horses. Lance kicks him. Keith grabs his leg, finds a pressure point, and digs in. Lance hisses several things in Altean that, if Coran were to hear them, would probably get his mouth washed out with soap. He knees Keith in the chin. Keith bites him.

“Motherfuc—!”

The researchers closest to them gather their things and scoot as far away as the hall will allow.

“Respected Paladins.” 

Lance sits up and tries to look like he’s not busy kicking Keith repeatedly under the table. Keith punches him in the shins. Lance stomps on his hand. One of the scribes glowers down at him looking like a very studious, but annoyed space chinchilla. Lance smiles. It probably comes out as a pained grimace, what with Keith trying his level best to grind his thumbs straight through the delicate bones of Lance’s ankle in retaliation for the hand-stomping.

It’s hard for a species without discernable eyeballs to roll their eyes, but Lance gets the impression this scribe is trying his level best. Lance smooths his face into something approximating Ina’s neutral mask of attention. The scribe sighs.

“This is a place of _quiet_ ,” there’s a heavy emphasis on the word, the scribe goes so far as to use the High Altean polite inflection, “reflection. If you would.”

Lance gets his foot flat to Keith’s chest and _shoves_ until Keith sprawls out from under the table. The scribe looks down at him. Keith finger waves. 

“Keith was just coming to help with my translations,” Lance says with his best innocent face. Keith nods. There’s a faint snicker that ripples through hall. Keith’s head snaps around like a wolf scenting prey. The hall falls silent.

“He can stay,” the scribe says with a sigh. “Provided he help with your translations _quietly_.” Keith nods so quickly his braid bounces. The scribe sighs again. “We will inform the Archivist.” The scribe gives them both one of the complicated little half bows the Galra have seem to collectively rediscovered. “By your leave.”

Lance props an elbow on the table and then drops his chin into his hand as he watches Keith haul himself up from the floor and then drop into a chair with an exaggerated groan of relief. “You’re never gonna learn your conjugations if you keep running away like that.”

“Please go fuck yourself and die in a ditch.”

“No,” Lance says sweetly before sliding a weathered manuscript across the table. Keith catches it with a little frown. “Make yourself useful.”

“Why do I do these things for you?”

“You aren’t doing them for me,” Lance says as he flips open a different manuscript of his own. “You’re doing them for Allura. Because you love her.”

Keith is quiet so long that Lance thinks he’s gonna leave it at that. Then he sighs and says so softly it’s almost lost in the low hum of the archive’s air filtration system: “Yeah.”

* * *

There’s no sense of time in the archives. Only the thin artificial light flickering between the stacks and the gentle whir of the archives’ climate control systems. Researchers come and go with the faintest of whispers. Keith lasts maybe an hour or two before he’s facedown in his folded arms, snoring lightly. Lance hopes he’s not drooling on some priceless manuscript or something because Lance knows without a doubt that the Archivist will hang both of them by their own entrails if they damage the books.

Scribes appear at his elbow to take documents or hand him new ones on a schedule that only they seem to understand. 

Hunk’d like this place, Lance thinks idly and then wonders why he’d had the thought at all.

He reads poetic sagas, histories, and fairytales with an indiscriminate and nearly unseemly haste. 

Other researchers occasionally float up to ask his opinion of some reference to a bit of Altean alchemy as if he’d have any sort of reasonable idea. They take his attempts to explain that he’s not an alchemist—glowing blue marks on his cheeks not withstanding—as either demure modesty, or an attempt to shoo them away, depending. It’s surreal. And unsettling. Lance finds himself running a fingertip over the marks she’d left on him thoughtfully. He wonders if they see something he doesn’t. 

One Galran researcher gets cranky with Lance’s repeated insistence that no, he really doesn’t know if the High Altean _al-kimiya_ is the root word for the Galran plains dialectic _khēme_. Lance is wondering if he’s going to actually get his eyes clawed out by a purple space bat-cat with an obsession with linguistic drift when Keith wakes up enough from his impromptu nap to growl something low and feral. The Galran scholar backs up, says something in a high, chirping little growl before making some kind of mudra with his hands. Lance watches, bemused, as he slinks back to his own section with his ears flat to his skull.

Lance kicks Keith under the table. “What was that?”

Keith groans, buries his face in his folded arms, and refuses to answer.

Lance kicks him until Keith lifts his head enough for one eye to be visible through the messy fall of his bangs. It’s an impressively malevolent glare. But Lance’s been dealing with Keith’s dirty looks for so long he’s immune. He kicks Keith once more, right in the shins, to prove he’s not intimidated by no space ninja—savior of the universe or not.

“ _Ugh_ ,” Keith says eloquently. Lance pulls back like he’s gonna kick him again and Keith scoots down the table until he’s out of range. “I said you were my,” Keith’s face scrunches up into something both horrified and deeply annoyed, “brother. Kind of.”

Lance says the word that the Archivist had used for them. “That?”

Keith’s makes a _hilarious_ face. “Never say that again. Never say anything in Galran ever again. Your pronunciation is terrible.” 

“His pronunciation is within acceptable parameters for an Altean speaker of Galran,” the Archivist intones from behind Keith. They both startle. Lance knocks over his tower of folders ( _dela_ ) and Keith falls off his chair. The Archivist snorts. Keith looks like he’s seriously considering skittering under the table like a crab that’s spotted a raven. 

Some of the manners Coran’d tried to beat into his head perk up and offer up a set of phrases. “Thank you for the consideration towards my,” there’s a word in Altean that refuses to translate into any other language because it specifically refers to Altean shapeshifting and the awkwardness that comes from an unexpected shift. The Archivist gives him one those long, slow blinks when Lance uses it. “And your kind words.”

“Such manners,” the Archivist murmurs. “Not seen in over ten thousand years, I would expect.”

It makes something squirm in Lance’s belly, pleased and uneasy all at once, to hear he’s managed to pull off ‘Altean diplomat’ well enough to be praised by someone like the Archivist. He thinks of Allura standing tall and remote with what Hunk used to call her ‘professional Princess’ smile on like a mask, hiding away all the wildness and fury that lived under her skin like a fever. Something must show on his face because Keith kicks him. Lance kicks him back. Before they can devolve into another round of tussling, the Archivist clears his throat.

“I have been informed you’ve worked your way through the entire collection of G’trok and most of Akorem Laan,” the Archivist says while Keith makes faces. The Archivist doesn’t even blink as he smacks Keith upside the back of his head. “While this is commendable, your research methodology is,” the Archivist uses a word that technically means ‘unorthodox,’ but Lance gets a feeling it’s also a little insulting from the way Keith snorts quietly. “I have suggestions.”

Lance nods, because like fuck is he gonna argue with the old man who could and regularly did start fights over the correct way to use the past imperfective participle. 

Keith makes a little chirping noise, like a kitten trying to get an adult’s attention. The Archivist’s big bat ears swivel in Keith’s direction. Keith holds out one of Allura’s journals. “Have you seen this diagram before?”

The Archivist says a number of things that Lance is pretty sure are very rude and neatly plucks the journal out of Keith’s hands. Those enormous bat ears flicker in agitation before they both toggle towards Lance as the Archivist peers at him over the edge of Allura’s journal. “I cannot read this,” the Archivist says stiffly. Lance recognizes this tone. It’s identical to the one his niece and nephew get when they’ve tripped over an English text they can’t decipher. “Why am I unable to read this?”

Lance sighs and holds out a hand. The Archivist drops Allura’s journal into it. “Magic locked,” he says. “I don’t know how she did it. Only we,” Lance flicks his fingers between himself and Keith, “paladins can read it.” Lance thinks for a moment. “And Coran.”

“Ah,” the Archivist says with some satisfaction. “The Custodian.”

Lance and Keith share a look. It’s not a … surprised look. 

“Right,” Lance says. “You’ve met?”

“We keep a spirited exchange.”

Lance looks over at Keith and finds the exact same flavor of ‘oh god’ stamped all over Keith’s face. 

“This symbol,” the Archivist says, tapping the little squiggle that looks like a stylized sixty-nine or broken iron cuffs, depending. “This is the symbol of the Sufferer. It is an old symbol. It would have been old even when the Princess was a small kit.”

Keith scrambles to his feet as the Archivist slides into a chair across from Lance. The Archivist draws a symbol with one claw on the table, etching deep into the wood. “It is a banned symbol of a proscribed cult.” There’s something very odd going on in the Archivist’s tone. Something that Lance can’t figure out, and from Keith’s nervous fidgeting, neither can Keith. “It has been a heresy for as long as the Galra empire has existed. Before even.”

“Long lived heresy,” Lance remarks with a blitheness that he doesn’t feel.

The Archivist catches a chain around his neck and draws it out with one clawed finger. On it dangles a little set of stylized broken cuffs. “Well,” he says with a faint smile. “Its adherents have always been very good at hiding.”

* * *

Later, much later, Lance finds himself spread eagle across one of the little cots in a little respite cell the scribes keep for visiting scholars. His mind chases itself like a dog trying to catch its own tail. Heresies, fairytales about princess with divine powers, and tragedies starring mad kings trip and blur together. His head hurts.

“Did you know she was religious?” Keith asks into the stillness between them.

“No,” Lance says. “She never said.”

Definitely didn’t say anything about belonging to a proscribed cult of her father’s best friend’s race. He’s not sure if Allura’d _believed_ -believed, or just found hope for the universe after the mess Zarkon’s empire had made of it inside its teachings. The Archivist had talked a lot about equality and rebellion and kindness. Allura’d’ve liked those kinds of teachings. Would’ve liked them even better for coming out of a heretical Galran sect. Lance curls into a ball and aches.

He can hear Keith moving in the darkness. The soft, repetitive sound of Keith cleaning his blades filling the air. “I’m going to yell at Kolivan,” Keith says decisively. Lance makes an interested noise. “I’ve never heard of this Sufferer or the casteless movement.”

Lance snorts. “Did you miss the bit where it’s proscribed?”

He can _hear_ Keith roll his eyes. “The Blades were a subversive organization trying to dismantle the regime for at least a couple of thousand years. I don’t think they’d’ve given a shit about a heresy or two.”

Lance flops out of his ball and wonders about that. For all the Blades had been pretty gung-ho about taking out Zarkon (and the druids. mostly the druids, really) they didn’t seem to have too many problems with the whole _empire_ thing. Then again, people rarely did as long as it the system largely works in their favor. They only start to complain when it gets personally uncomfy. 

He makes a noncommittal noise. Keith huffs. 

“Maybe he didn’t think it was relevant,” Lance relents. “Sounds like these casteless types kept it pretty far on the d-l. He might’ve thought it was a dead religion. You wouldn’t sit down start explaining, I don’t fuckin’ know, paganism to some baby Blade, would you?”

Keith’s suspiciously quiet.

“Dude,” Lance rolls into a sloppy seat, grinning. “Are you a secret worshipper of, like, Zeus or something?”

Keith throws his whet stone at Lance’s head. 

Lance catches, fumbles it, and it falls with a hard _thack_ onto the stone floor. “If I search your shit am I gonna find a ritual knife? Little thunderbolt symbols? Holy shit, this is the best thing I’ve heard all day and I think we just got told we’ve got a solid lead on how to get Allura back.”

Keith tackles him and things quickly devolve from high theology to another round of Keith deciding that just because he can’t win a verbal fight, he’s got to prove he’s a sneaky fucking bastard of a fighter. 

Later, when Lance is nursing a new set of bruises and Keith’s smug, Keith says, all quiet and kinda shy, “Do you think if I asked the Archivist, he’d give me one of those symbols?”

Lance blows out a breath. “I think he’s been waiting for you to ask for a long time.”

* * *

He’s standing on a wooden pier again. 

Triple moons rise above him, too low and too fast to be anything other than a dream.

When he looks down the water moves in odd ways, its silvered edge catching the dying light in fractal ripples. The horizon is full of deep, dark clouds that loom like a wall. Lightning ripples over them in intervals too precisely to be natural. He’s afraid of that storm. Afraid of the things that lurk in it.

A shadow slithers around his feet, slick and sickening.

The marks on his face, the marks she’d left, ignite like a magnesium flare—blinding and burning without heat. Blue-white light trickles down his face like tears to pool at his feet. Each step smears that brilliant light along the warped boards of the pier. Each step chases it further away from the shore into the frothing waves of the angry ocean.

Allura keeps the shadow trapped here, that great festering mass of madness and bitterness, but he….

He is its Enemy. One of five, but enough for it to know fear.

 _I can see you_ , he says to it.

The air fills with screaming.

 _I can see you_ , he repeats. _And you can’t have her_.

The darkness tries to rise in front of him, oil-slick bubbles rising and popping with gross wet sounds. _and what can you do,_ it hisses at him. _what can you do, alone and afraid?_

 _I’m not afraid_ , he tells it as he harries it farther down a peer like a hound chasing a rabid creature. _And soon I won’t be alone._

The light drips down his fingers, off his face, dripping into that darkness like a cauterizing acid, and it screams, rises shrieking and cursing his name and says—

* * *

He sits bolt upright, gun swinging into position against his shoulder, when the scream cuts out of Keith. 

Even in the dark he can see the blaster mark against the old stone. There’s a reason that Coran carefully collects all his weapons from him every time he comes back from a mission. Lance drops the gun and rubs his face with both hands. Then he looks at Keith and doesn’t bother to say anything. He’s suddenly too tired for that. The old, familiar exhaustion eating away at his bones.

“You too?” Keith asks. He looks shaken in the uneven light from the planet’s three distant moons. 

Lance opens his mouth to explain what he’d seen, the shadow and the light dripping down his face in ribbons of silver, and finds no words. He closes his mouth and just looks at Keith, sick with miserable foreboding. When he shakes his head, his throat tight with all the words that can’t explain what he’d seen, Keith just looks sympathetic.

“It was the fight with Shiro,” Keith says, hushed and halting, because he’s always been braver than Lance. A cold prickle runs up Lance’s spine and down his arms, raising all the fine hairs there, and turns his palms clammy. He clenches his hands into tight fists until they ache. “Right after,” Keith gestures at his face and the scar there like a brand—because it _is_ a brand, Lance realizes with a start. “And I swung to cut off the arm—” not Shiro’s arm, Lance notices, but _the_ arm “—only Shiro turned into Allura. It went right through her.” Keith curls into a ball, pressing his face into his knees. “She didn’t even look surprised.”

“Your subconscious is an asshole.”

Keith laughs a little at that, choked sounding, and nods. 

Lance stares at the far wall and the spiderweb of Lichtenberg figures left by the blaster fire. He can hear Keith breathing in the darkness, waiting.

“I think we’re running out of time,” Lance says. He remembers the desperation in the dream. Remembers his furious determination and reckless bravado. The shadow running free over the frothing ocean. He looks down at his hands and watches them shake. “We’re out of time.”

* * *

“Lance,” Hunk says, all surprised and shy, when they finally get him on comms. He looks good, Lance realizes, really good. His skin is darker than Lance remembers, bronzed by the sun until it’s nearly as dark as Ryan’s, and his hair left to grow well past his shoulders. Lance wonders if he should feel guilty for the way that Hunk’s all shy and nervous around him. They’d been best friends once.

“Hey.” It’s not his best line—and fuck you, Pidge, his lines are great—but it’s all that he can force out of his suddenly dry throat.

They sit there staring at each other, unsure of what to say. All Lance can think about it is their last disastrous conversation and then month and months and months of Lance acting like a great big brat.

“Oh my god, this physically painful,” Keith says. It’s the only warning that Lance gets before Keith drops into a seat next to him, leaning heavily against him as Keith waves to Hunk. “Hi, Hunk.”

Hunk’s expression immediately morphs into one of exasperated fondness. “This is your super secret Blade mission? You can tell me when you go to visit Lance. I’m not gonna get jealous.”

“Yes, it is,” Keith says, blithely ignoring Lance’s attempts to shove him away, or get up and abscond. Keith gets him in a headlock and pins him. “And yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t,” Hunk mutters. He looks petulant, like he just got told that ‘no, Hunk, you may not take apart the Galra particle drive in the middle common room.’ Or ‘no, Hunk, ‘this tastes good!’ is not in fact a request to be told the ingredient list.’ Or, ‘no, Hunk, giving everyone a detailed description of how the atmosphere is gonna melt our insides is not actually a helpful contribution to this planning session.’ It’s been a while since Lance’s seen Hunk’s petulant face. It’s still cute.

“He gets jealous?” Lance asks Keith. 

“Yeah,” Keith says over Hunk’s sputtered denials. Keith seems to take Lance asking questions as a sign that he’s not gonna immediately bolt for the exits and let’s go of him. “He sulks.”

“I do not sulk,” Hunk defends. “I have never sulked. You guys sulk.”

Keith turns a flat look on Hunk until Hunk squirms.

“Solid reasoning there, big guy,” Lance tells Hunk, all serious. “A plus logic.”

“I don’t know why Romelle thought it’d be a good idea for you guys to be friends,” Hunk complains. “It is literally the worst idea she’s ever had, and she’s had some terrible ones.”

“I don’t know. The whole attempt to set Kolivan up with that senior diplo from Palaven was a pretty bad one since Tuarian, erm, bodily fluids are toxic to Galrans,” Keith says thoughtfully while Lance tries to wrap his head around the obvious fact that not only are Hunk and Keith friends, but they’re also friends with Romelle, who has a taste for social meddling. Actually. Lance knew that about Romelle already. He just didn’t know that he’d somehow fallen into her project list.

Though. That really did explain a lot.

“Wait,” Lance says as his brain catches up to the conversation. “She tried to set up Kolivan?”

Keith looks resigned. “She thinks he’s lonely.”

“She’s very empathetic,” Hunk adds. He looks proud and fond, like a doting daddy bird of a fledgling just testing out its wings. Though the bird species here are, unfortunately, a pair of nosy meddlers who meddle and Romelle apparently had negative self-preservation instinct because, wow, Kolivan is not someone Lance’d pick as a target.

“She also likes to meddle,” Keith says with a pointed look. Lance nods emphatically as Hunk makes faces at them. “I’d make comments about how you aren’t keeping your girlfriend satisfied, but I’ve been reliably told that’s rude.”

“It is rude,” Hunk says with a sigh. “Don’t say that.”

There’s a whole ass story behind that and while Lance really, really wants to know it, he also thinks that they are maybe getting away from the point of the entire call. Namely, they’ve maybe figured out a way to bring Allura back and now is the time to get the entire gang back together for a reunion tour or some shit.

“So,” he says, interrupting whatever conversational rabbit hole Hunk and Keith’d been about to drive their clown car of a conversation down. “We’ve figured out how to bring back Allura.”

Hunk looks between the two of them. Lance braces for an argument, but all Hunk says is: “And it involves Altean alchemical bullshit, doesn’t it?”

“So much bullshit,” Keith says. “All the bullshit.”

Lance punches him in the kidneys. “Some of the bullshit is cryptic proscribed cultist Galran magic bullshit. You can’t blame it all on the Alteans.”

“This,” Hunk says as he points between the two of them, “this is not reassuring me.”

* * *

They divide the rest of the gang between themselves. Rock-paper-scissors for the more difficult choices. (“This would be a good time to talk to Shiro, just, you know, saying.” “No.” “Oh wow, you two saying that in stereo is creepy. Glaring at me in stereo is also creepy.”) And Lance, for his sins, gets both Pidge and Matt. He is not looking forward to explaining dimension-hopping, reality-warping uses of Altean alchemy to cage eldritch forces trying to tear apart the universe and how they maybe know about this thanks to his girlfriend’s fixation on an ancient proscribed Galran religion’s equally ancient prophecies. 

Lance doesn’t know when he fell down a hole and ended up in a H.P. Lovecraft story, but he resents it. If there are tentacles of any kind, he’s gonna be pissed. 

His explanation of events and their plans might not be the clearest things ever.

Pidge watches him with a complicated expression while Ina laughs soundlessly with her face pressed against Pidge’s shoulder. Eventually Pidge closes her mouth. Opens it again like she’s gonna say something, presses her knuckles against her lips, frowns. 

“I know,” Lance says.

“I,” Pidge starts, but her voice fails her halfway through the next word and it dies as an unarticulated mess of vowels. 

“I know,” Lance says again, trying for reassuring.

“You’re explaining this to Matt,” Pidge says.

“Yeah,” Lance sighs. “I already drew the short straw on that. Also, apparently he likes me?”

“My brother is a creature driven by eccentric whims and fancies,” Pidge says with her nose in the air. “I don’t pretend to understand the bizarre workings of his mind.” Then she shrugs. “You aren’t afraid of him like most people are these days and you give him shit.”

“Your brother is a very strange man,” Lance says by way of agreement. “Will he come?”

Pidge sighs. “For Allura? He’ll come.”

* * *

“Janice!” Lance chirps as Curtis’ face finally comes into focus on the screen. Seriously, Lance has the worst luck with the inter-galactic space communications array. He’s cursed. The cursed one, it is him. “Leave him.”

Curtis sighs. 

“Now that we have the pleasantries out of the way—” Lance starts.

“ _Pleasantries_.”

Lance waggles a finger at the screen. “You hush. I need a favor.”

Curtis looks skeptical. What is it with everyone giving him the skeptical look when he asks for a simple favor? Shit is rude. 

“It’s not a difficult favor,” Lance wheedles. “At least I don’t think it is. And besides, you won’t be the only one asking.”

“You want me to get Takashi to do something.”

Wow. Is that a lot of bitterness packed into one sentence. Under normal circumstances, Lance’d want to sit down and pull the entire story out of Curtis like drawing venom from a spider bite, but right now he’s working under some strict time constraints. He gives Curtis a look. It’s a look that says ‘we’re coming back to this’ in no uncertain terms. Curtis gives him a look right back. It’s a look that says ‘like fuck we are’ with triple underline.

“You could always talk to Takashi yourself.”

Lance winces at that. Because, yeah, he could. He _should_. But at this point things have dragged on so long between them that Lance doesn’t know where to start. It’s an awkward, festering wound of his own making and he knows it. He’s never been good at facing his mistakes.

Curtis sighs like he can see all of that unfold behind Lance’s eyes. Honestly, Curtis should just run from all of them and their unimaginable piles of bullshit. He’s way too nice a dude to be caught up in it.

“I could,” Lance agrees and then wants to cringe away from how his voice sounds. “But I’m not sure he’d take me seriously.”

“He would,” Curtis says. He looks sad and tired and Lance feels guilty for putting that look on Curtis’ face. Feels guilty for how often all of them put that look on his face.

“Enh.” Lance wobbles his hand left-right and screws up his face in a parody of uncertainty. Curtis gives him a sharp look. “There’s a lot of Altean magic bullshit, some Galran heretical religious nonsense, and, like, other miscellaneous bullshit. It’s my damned idea and I’m not sure I entirely believe it?”

“And you want me to explain this?”

“Oh no,” Lance says and waves that away with one hand. “I’m gonna make Matt explain it with theoretical quantum physics to dress it up in respectable clothing all tidy and mathematical—not a piece of mystical magical bullshit in sight. Do the academic version of Pretty Woman all up on this shit. Take it out to the nice shops and get it a new linquistical wardrobe.”

Curtis snorts, rubs a hand over his face, and then sighs. “You are ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” Lance says. “You keep telling me that. So?” He gives Curtis his best piteous face because he knows, at the end of the day, Curtis is a _sucker_ and will cave every time. “Will you help?”

Curtis smiles at him. It’s Curtis’ ‘you are lucky I like you’ smile and not Curtis’ ‘I am resigned because I am too nice to say no’ smile, which is a significant improvement on how this conversation had started out. “Of course,” Curtis says. “You know he’d do it without me saying anything, right? He’d do anything for Allura.” Curtis pins him with a look. “He do anything for any of you.”

Lance squirms. Curtis waits him out, as implacable as the tides. Eventually Lance gives up first because he’s got the patience of an ADHD-addled ferret with its impulse control permanent impaired. “Yeah,” Lance says. “I know.”

* * *

He’s sitting on that damned pier. Again. 

(why his subconscious likes this pier so much, Lance does not fucking know)

A distant roll of thunder echoes over the slow waves. Not enough to be anything other than a faraway threat. He can’t even see the edge of the storm. It’s only sound and the faint shiver of waves across the ocean. The night sky is bare, its three moons sitting fat and heavy overhead, so bright that he can see everything painted over in a faint sheen of silver moonlight.

Allura’s standing next to him.

Her feet are bare, her hands are empty, and the wind moves small pieces of her hair in lazy patterns. 

He wants to say something, to call her name, to reach up and run cautious fingers through the silver fall of her hair. But he’s pinned to the pier as if hit by a sudden round of paralysis. As if some small, vicious creature has crept up and injected him with poison so he can only sit at her feet. The wood has small, flaking splinters under his fingers that crack off in his grasp as he grips down. Eventually, with great effort, he forces his fingers to touch the edge of her foot.

She looks down at him. Her eyes are full of silver-blue light that burn like the heart of a dying star.

“Sometimes,” Allura says, quiet as a grave, “sometimes she sleeps, and I can … miss things.”

* * *

He wakes up with tears on his face and her name in his mouth.

He’s not surprised when the location of the holiest of holy places for the Sufferists (i.e., the spot Most Auspicious And Magical For Doing Crazy Ass Proscribed Religious Rituals That Are Not In Any Way Opening A Door Between Worlds No Sir That Insinuation Is Insulting We Are Insulted) that Keith wrangles out of the Archivist is a long, wooden pier winding out into a silver-blue ocean at the edge of a desert. 

Keith geeks out about the ruins covered in sand, face mashed against the window of their transport unit, chirping questions at the Archivist like the universe’s most excitable murder kitten. Shit is adorable. Lance’d make fun of him until the far side of forever, except for the fact that he can’t seem focus on anything for longer than sixty seconds and even that is a struggle. (He _knows_ this desert, that ocean. He _knows_ it and—) The Archivist answers in low, rumbling lectures that Lance hears, but doesn’t really bother translating. The sound of it washes over him like slow ocean waves and he catches the meaning occasionally, like message bobbles floating on the waves.

He ignores Keith and the Archivist when they land. 

Just walks out onto the pier like he’s been here a million times before. ( _because he has, he has, he has. he's stood on this pier and called her name and fought the demon in her shadow and—_ ) The ocean stretches out in front of him, endless, like the desert stretches out behind him and he knows Keith is watching him with that little worried frown twisting his mouth, beetling down his eyebrows, putting lines around his eyes.

“Is there a storm coming?” He asks already knowing the answer.

“In nine days’ time,” the Archivist answers. He knows like Lance knows that this is important.

“Nine days,” Lance echoes, then nods. They can get this prepped in nine days. It’ll be a bitch and half, but they’ve done more under stricter time constraints. 

Either they bring Allura back, or he walks right out an airlock.

* * *

He’s up to his eyeballs drawing alchemical matrixes across the desert, long flowing symbols cut through with sharp, geometric designs, when Hunk arrives. Lance freezes, staring. Hunk looks back at him with a complicated expression—half guilt, half anger, half something Lance doesn’t recognize on Hunk’s face. (Yes, he knows that’s too many halves in there, but he’s kinda freaking out right now. Don’t judge.) A sea breeze washes over them, bring the smell of salt and rain. There’s a storm brewing in the distance, large and vicious. 

It takes Hunk three long steps to cross the beach, step down out of the sand dunes, to pick Lance up in a bear hug.

Lance squawks. 

He wishes he could say he say something mature, or composed, or just, you know, anything other than flail like a great big dork while Hunk squeezes him like he’s a lost teddy bear. He flails a hand at Keith in a silent plea for help. Keith, because he is an asshole, laughs at them.

“I’m so sorry,” Hunk is saying on repeat against Lance’s collarbones. “I didn’t realize how bad you were and then I got mad because you were being a great big _jerk_ but I know it was just depression and grief, but I couldn’t stand the things you’d say and—”

This can go on all day if Lance lets it. 

“Buddy,” Lance squeaks as he tries to pat Hunk in a reassuring manner. “I can’t breathe.”

Hunk drops him on his feet, looking abashed. Lance manfully resists rubbing at his ribs because that’d be petty and Keith is giving him that ‘do not fuck this up’ look that generally makes Lance want to punch him except right now Keith’s right. Now is not the time to fuck up. Not this. 

He pats Hunk’s shoulder because Hunk’s still looking watery around the edges. “I’d apologize for being an asshole for the past, uh, year?”

“Year and half!” Keith chirps because, again, Keith’s an asshole.

Lance pauses for a moment to glare at him, but Keith’s too busy being smug and pleased with himself to notice. “Anyway,” Lance says with more emphasis than he really needs. “I’m a jerk. I’m a jerk all the time and I’m sorry.”

Hunk grabs him in another bear hug. Lance squirms, trying to find a way to breathe, as Hunk tucks him under his chin and kinda … rocks him. After a little bit Lance gives up and just pats Hunk as best he can while Hunk sniffles into his hair. It’s a long time until Hunk puts him down.

“I told you he was doing better,” Keith says after Hunk finally releases Lance. He’s sitting on the edge of the pier, feet dangling over the water, chewing on something that looks like those strips of jerky that the Blades like so much that taste like death and despair. 

“Yeah, but.” Hunk makes a gesture that encompasses all of Lance and he’d be insulted by that, but it’s such a return to normal that he’s swamped by a sudden wash of giddy relief. They’re good. They’ll be good. He did not fuck this one up beyond repair.

Keith cocks his head to the side, considering. He shrugs. “He’s better now.”

“Fuck you both,” Lance says, letting his innate capacity for bullshit see him through. “I’m awesome.”

Keith looks him up and down, lazy. It’s so much Jamie’s arrogant, easy gesture that Lance blinks at him. Keith raises one hand and tips it side to side. “Enh.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

* * *

t-6 days and Pidge shows up.

Lance holds her shoulders and then, with precisely zero subtlety and a great deal of performance, looks behind her. Pidge punches him in the kidney with a hard, little rabbit punch.

“He’ll be here, asshole.”

“He’d better,” Lance says, tension making his voice harder than he means. “This entire fucking thing won’t work without him.”

Pidge just pats his arm, ignores his tone, and then manhandles him towards their messy base camp. “He’ll be here.”

* * *

t-4 days and they are still down one Takashi Shirogane.

“Pidge.”

“Whining at me is not going to make him arrive any sooner.”

“Are you _sure_ that he’s—”

Pidge throws a screwdriver at him. “Yes! He and Matt just need to talk.” Her face closes down in tight, unhappy lines. “About a lot of things.”

Lance, entirely without meaning to, look across the beach to where Hunk’s trying to teach Keith to spear fish in the shallows. “Matt’s not the only one that Shiro needs to talk to.”

“Yeah,” Pidge says, following his gaze. “But he’s gotta want to talk to Shiro first.”

“You think Keith doesn’t want to talk to Shiro?” Lance asks with a lot of expressive eyebrows.

Pidge shrugs. “Doesn’t matter what I think. Matters what Shiro thinks.”

Lance watches Keith pop up from the shallows, a fish impaled neatly through the middle on the end of his spear. He sighs. “What a fucking mess.”

“Hey.” Pidge punches him the shoulder. “Shiro’s talking to Matt, and then we’ll get Allura back, and then we’ll fix everything else.”

“Got a plan there, don’t you?”

“Bullet pointed action items and annotated,” Pidge says with a grin. “Color coded, because what are we? Animals?”

“Lets just hope that Matt doesn’t throw Shiro out an airlock,” Lance says, remembering Matt’s constant, simmering rage.

Pidge winces. “That would put a damper on my plans.”

* * *

It’s day eight, right before the mother of all storms is due to hit, and Lance is losing his gods damned mind.

“Are you sure he’ll be here?”

“Yes, Lance,” Pidge says as she fiddles with the edge of one of the matrixes carved into the pier. Lance smacks her hands away from it and she makes a face at him. “He won’t miss this. Matt won’t let him.”

“That’s assuming Matt didn’t throw him into a black hole or something.”

“Matt didn’t throw me into a black hole.”

Lance yelps, startles, and falls off the pier while Pidge cackles at him. He surfaces just in time to watch Pidge fling herself into Shiro’s arms. He obligingly picks her up and swings her around like she weighs less than half a cupcake. He’s still big, built like a brick shit house, and exudes a comfortable air of command that says you can settle back because everything’s going to be fine. Only now Lance knows that Shiro is a lying liar who lies like a lying thing. Also. He can see the lines etching themselves into the edges of Shiro’s mouth and what looks to be the remnants of one impressive black eye.

“I thought Matt was supposed to explain things, not punch you,” Lance calls from the water.

Shiro looks down at him, amused. “Apparently, he could do both.” Pidge clambers up to his shoulders and sits there like a little goblin. She touches her fingertips carefully to the edges of the bruise, frowning. Shiro smiles at her. “It’s fine, Pidge. I kind of deserved it.”

“I’m still going to yell at him,” Pidge says, frowning with worry lines making her look older than her scant nineteen years. “I told him to talk to you like an adult. Not a feral thirteen-year-old.”

“It’s fine,” Shiro repeats. He looks back down at Lance. “Need a hand up?”

Before Lance can say anything, Shiro’s oversized, floating Altean arm scoops him out of the water like he’s a bedraggled kitten. “Thanks,” Lance says, drily. He catches Shiro looking around, trying to be sneaky about it. “The Archivist hauled Keith off for grammar and history lessons,” Lance explains as he wrings out his shirt. “They’ll be back later.”

Shiro makes a non-committal noise as Pidge slides off his shoulder. She looks between the two of them and then pats Shiro’s shoulder. When he looks down at her, eyebrows winging towards his hairline, she gives him two thumbs up and a grin before trotting off to terrorize someone else. Shiro sighs.

“So,” Shiro says slowly. “We should talk.”

“Leave him, Sharon,” Lance says. Shiro blinks at him. Lance shrugs. “I’ve been telling your charming husband, Janice, to leave you since, like, forever. I figured I’d make it fair.”

“You’ve been telling him to leave me?” Shiro asks, face impressively neutral, voice flat. Then he blinks again. “Wait. Sharon? _Janice?_ ”

“Like I told him, if you two insist on acting like middle-aged white ladies in a made-for-television movie, then I’m gonna call you by white lady names. Want to stop getting called by a middle-aged white lady name? Stop acting like that one.”

Shiro opens his mouth, pauses, and then frowns at him but it’s more faintly confused than actually upset. "I feel like there’s something sexist going on in that statement. Just a little.”

Lance shrugs expressively. “Whatever, Sharon. Leave him.”

* * *

Lance is standing in a valley of sand.

He can hear the ocean behind him, smell it, but it’s blocked by the gentle slope of the dunes. Under his feet is a fused road of broken Galra fighters, Altean drones, and fragments of MFE-Ares wings. The whole thing glows a faint, dirty silver. The whole valley is filled with the sibilant hiss of the sand sliding down the sides of the valley’s bowl. The sand never stops moving, as if a thousand snakes lived just under it, writhing. The road is hot beneath his feet, like it’s been baking under the sun, but he keeps walking anyway.

His marks are blazing again, lit like magnesium flares, burning in the darkness.

Silver-blue light slides down his face, pools in his hands, drips onto the road like heavy rain.

It sizzles against the road, the sound distorted, and he leaves evaporating footsteps as he walks. 

Lance ignores it. There’s a temple at the end of the road, its doors flanked by rows of lions, their eyes burning like his marks burn. The spicy-sweet smell of juniberry flowers is everywhere. Rising off his skin like a steam, like a mist, and coiling in the air. It almost blocks out the sick smell of rot and decay hanging heavy over the valley. Something died here, trapped and screaming. He keeps walking.

He’s looking for Allura again. He knows this without linear context. The temple rises above him, massive and heavy, its doors sealed shut. This is Oriande, he thinks. Between having that thought and the next breath he’s standing before those impossibly huge doors. He lays a hand on the seal. His hand ignites with blue-white light, burning against the fused metal of the doors. The metal eats at the light and he hesitates. 

_stop_ , says a voice, says a million voices. 

He half turns, hand still on the door.

 _you don’t have to do this_ , says a figure on the road. It’s tall, dressed in heavy Altean armor, a cape sweeping down to the ground. _she made her choice._

“The one you pushed her to, you mean?” Lance asks. He’s angry. The rage that’s lived in his bones dormant and sleeping wakes all at once, turning his blood molten in his veins with poisonous vitriol. “The only one you ever let her have?”

 _it must be contained,_ the figure says. _she knew what that meant._

“Because you never let her think there was another choice!”

 _she cannot fail where we failed_ , the figure tells him. It is implacable, without remorse or mercy. Lance hates it as he’s hated little else.

“Go fuck yourself,” he growls. 

_the choice has been made,_ intones the figure. Its voice is a metronome, ticking out time that Lance no longer has. He can hear Allura’s anger in its undertones, but her rage is a fire that warmed his soul, a blaze to curl around in the middle of a winter night. This figure, the amalgamation of all her father’s mistakes, is _cold_ , and the frost edges of that cold ring inside Lance’s heart like a cracked brass bell.

“And now we’re making another choice,” he tells it. “It’s never been a zero sum game.”

 _if you love her,_ it begins but Lance is already there, in front of it like a flash step between frames.

He leans in close to that flickering face, teeth bared in a pale imitation of Keith’s fanged snarl of rage. “I do better than love her,” he hisses. “I trust her.” The figure does not move when Lance steps back, walking to the door that now stands ajar. “And she left me a path to walk.”

The road behind him is empty.

He puts his hand on the door, pushing, and—

* * *

The storm hits at dawn.

The sky goes as dark as dusk, a murky sort of twilight shot through by lightning and the low rumble of thunder. The ocean churns to froth, like the speckled spit of a rabid animal. The air hums with barely restrained energy, the electricity of the storm and the anxious anticipation of their assembled company. Hunk shivers next to him, unnerved. Lance finds himself unmoved. He’s seen worse storms. He’s been battered by worse in this place, on this pier.

“Time, I think,” he says and almost doesn’t recognize his voice. 

He doesn’t have to look for Keith. They’ve been over the plan so many times he’d be surprised if Keith couldn’t recite the entire thing back to him in perfect mimicry. Shiro says something, some word of warning or perhaps encouragement, but the wind plucks it away, rattles it around until there’s nothing left but the faintest suggestion of words. Keith looks back, just a half turn, and nods at Shiro.

Lance breathes out, controlled and careful. The tide steals the sand from under his heels and pushes it over his toes. It’s rising steadily, already over his ankles as the storm rolls in. The circle, however, has been set in Altean silver and gleams around him. Hunk steps away, steps back into his own place within the matrix. Lance wills his heart to beat slow and steady.

They stand five and two on the beach. Her paladins, her counselor, and her outsider. One to anchor her to the world which was, one to anchor her to the world which is, and the rest of them to _fight_.

Keith walks down the pier, the warped wood creaking under his weight, and his back is very straight.

Lance breathes in as Keith draws his Marmora knife and runs his hand along its edge. It ripples under his hand like a snake shedding its skin until it’s a long, curved streak of purple and silver. The runes carved into it glow blue-white against the storm.

Keith flips the sword around in his hand and grips it _hard_. Lance can feel the change in Keith, a focus running from the blade to his hands, down his feet, through the pier into the earth below, and rooting him in some current only known to him. Grounding him. The hair on Lance’s arms raise like he’s touched an electrical current and he holds his breath. Keith faces the storm at the end of the pier. Squares up. And then drives his sword through circle Shiro’d etched into the wood with his Altean hand under Pidge’s direction. 

The circle ignites. Lance’s markings ignite. Keith breathes out in sync with Lance (with Shiro, with Pidge, with Hunk) and their breath is a blue-white smoke curling in the wind.

Coran’s voice is a thin ribbon of sound against the roar of the storm, an implacable recitation of words older than the war. A prayer passed down from believer to believer in the quiet, hidden places of the war. 

Matt’s voice joins Coran’s in odd duet, his rage at injustice a counterpoint to Coran’s endless patience.

The storm shivers around them, rain hanging like crystals in the air as reality fragments, fractals of possibilities spilling around them. Lance holds his hands out, palms up, like he’s seeking benediction, and blue-white light pools in his hands. Spills over his fingers, down his cheeks, and hits the lines of the alchemy circle he stands in—the very center of the matrix—and floods out from there like fire following a line of gasoline. He’s the conduit to hold the door open and all he has to do is stand there and bleed. Which is fine. He’s been bleeding every day she’s been gone.

Lightning hits the edge of the pier, close enough to blow Keith’s hair away from his face where he kneels next to his sword. His eyes open, slow and collected. A shadow looms over him at the end of the pier and he doesn’t blink. Keith rises, slow, dragging his sword out of the warped pier with the grating sound of wood splintering. The shadow shivers and seethes.

 _half-breed whelp_. Its voice is a blow, a violation. It’s not a voice at all but a slithering sensation that feels like being _flayed_ , skin and muscle stripped from bone. Distantly he can hear Pidge scream, high and furious. Keith moves. A time-snap reflex where one moment he’s standing with his sword in a loose one-handed grip and the next he’s got his sword buried to the hilt in that shadow. 

The shadow writhes on the Keith’s sword, a sickening slide along the steel and starlight of his blade. 

Shiro shouts in alarm as the darkness coils in on itself. Lance doesn’t see the blow that hits Keith, but saltwater fountains into the air when he hits the ocean. Shiro roars a word in Galran Lance knows is filthy, violent, and charges the length of the pier. The shadow spreads out, a glistening oil-slick smear of black and purple against the sky, bracing for impact.

But Shiro’s Altean arm gives him the right of first contact and it punches through that shroud of malevolence from behind. Shiro takes a stance, hostile, between it and Keith as Keith hauls himself out of the water—feet braced, hands up. The darkness coils endless like a mobius loop of hatred and rapacious greed. It’d eat the hearts out of all of them if it could, but it can’t seem to touch Shiro. Colour flickers around Shiro, blue-white and pale pinks curling protectively over him in a nimbus of shifting power. 

Keith launches himself at the shadow again, hitting it with a massive one-handed blow, he drives his sword—a consecrated Blade of Marmora—through that mass of darkness point first. The sword goes up in flames. Keith goes up in flames, a matrix of blue-white light snapping up his arm and over his body in echo of the circles Lance’s etched across the beach and up the pier, superheating until the air riots around him at the subatomic level. 

The shadow pulses and writhes, caught fast in the power bleeding off Lance, channeled through the matrixes and directed by Keith’s sword.

Shiro stalks the darkness where Keith has it pinned and there’s something … _massive_ in the way he moves forward with the promise of violence, vengeance, in his every step. Something predatory in his weight, an echo, maybe, of his gladiator days. 

Lance knows without linear context to close his hand into a fist, like he can pull the corruption festering on the end of the pier out of their world like a weed. He snaps his hand up and fire erupts over Shiro in a lattice of silver light. The shadow _screams_

It looks down at Shiro as it screams and shivers, and finally sees him. The beach goes silent. _Hello again, Champion_.

The shadow ripples, condenses in on itself, and then it’s Haggar hanging on the end of Keith’s sword. She smiles a death’s head smile, a parody of affection, and her hissing cackles raises the hair on the back of Lance’s neck. _I was right_ , she hisses through that cracked grin. _You were our greatest weapon. How do you like my gifts?_

Shiro doesn’t answer. He punches his Altean fist through her heart where Keith has her speared through. The arm that Allura’s fashioned and powered with the crystal from her crown. Haggar screams, writhes, and smokes in shadowy tendrils as Shiro pulls her open, cracks her ribs back like he’s pulling open a box. 

She loses form, face bleeding into festering darkness bleeding again into burning purple eyes. 

Keith leans forward, body weight driving her down against the pier and the circle Lance keeps ignited with his own blood. His ears ring and his breath is fast, but he holds. They hold. Shiro plunges his hands into that heart of darkness, flesh and Altean metal, and the blue-white light pooling over his skin in a nimbus of colour heats the air until Lance can hear it sizzle.

The shadow _burns_ at Shiro’s touch. It shrieks profanities at them in a mess of languages—Altean and Galran bleeding together like an obscenity. Shiro ignores it, up to his elbows now in the darkness in a denial of physics. The screaming stops and Shiro _heaves_ , muscles bunching and straining. 

He pulls a body from that putrefying mess—silver-white hair and midnight dark skin, long limbs and slender fingers. Lance knows that form. He staggers. Would fall, but Hunk has him caught in his arms, steady where Lance wants to fall to pieces.

“You have to hold on,” Hunk yells over the storm. “Hold on!”

Shiro pulls away, Allura cradled high against his chest, his body curving protectively around hers and Keith flash-steps back. Drags that consecrated blade from the shadow, from the festering insanity that’s all that’s left of Haggar’s rotted soul, and sets himself between them—sword up, eyes burning. The shadow spills into the air like smoke from a funeral pyre, making to flee.

But there’s nothing in the universe that can stand before Keith when he’s holding that sword with any kind of intent. 

Keith spins, sword a burning arc of blue-white light that Lance feels pull out of himself (Hunk holding him whispering to _hold on, hold on, buddy we’re almost through_ and Lance wavers, braces against Hunk’s solidity and holds), and cuts through the remnants of a malevolent intelligence that corrupted the universe for a thousand years. 

Light eats that shadow, burning through it like sunlight through morning fog. And then there’s nothing but silence. Stillness reigns.

Lance crumples to the sand, Hunk kneeling with him as his legs goes out from under him. 

“Oh,” Allura breathes. 

Lance can feel Hunk’s breath stutter and hear Pidge’s faint sob. 

Shiro uncurls from his protective huddle around her, gentle as he lets her stand, however shaky, on her own feet. Keith takes a stumbling step towards them, sword falling from nerveless fingers, his expression stricken with wonder. The waves are the only thing that move for a long moment as Allura looks at her own hands as if she doesn’t recognize them.

All of a sudden, improbably, Lance is reminded of an old children’s story where a unicorn is turned into a mortal girl. _what have you done?_ She’d cried. _What have you done to me?_

Allura doesn’t cry.

She looks down the pier, eyes raking beach, until she sees him. Lance tries to stand, to go to her, but he falls again, body finally failing. Hunk catches him, slings an arm over his shoulders. He can hear Pidge crying—a hitching, shattering sound. He shoves at Hunk’s shoulder, trying to leverage himself upwards, as if he can push off of Hunk’s strength. 

Keith strips out of his jacket and offers it to Shiro, who wraps it around Allura’s shoulders. 

“Careful,” Shiro warns as she takes her first trembling step. “Easy.”

She walks between them, Shiro on her left and Keith on her right, and they lead her down the pier. It crumbles after them, blackened and twisted bits falling into the sea. They take a very long time. Lance leans against Hunk, breath shallow and head spinning, and just … drifts for a little while.

“Oh,” Allura says again and suddenly she’s right in front of him. Keith’s jacket clutched around her and her hair tumbling all around her almost brushing the sand. She extends one hand, fingers trembling. The light moves oddly between them. He tips his face into her hand as she traces his markings. 

She breathes his name like a benediction. He’s crying, soundless and overwhelmed, as her fingers ghosts his face like a blind woman reading braille. 

“My own,” she says. He catches her wrist, the bones there so slender to house such impossible strength, and pulls her down. She comes like grace, tumbling into his lap in a cloud of hair and the smell of juniberry flowers. She kisses his markings, his eyelids, his mouth until he laughs.

He catches her thighs, guides them around his waist, and the stands with her caught in the cradle of his arms. She laughs as she bounces. Joy burns through him and he can’t stop grinning at her just as she can’t stop grinning at him. She laughs again as he says her name, spins her in a circle, her hair flying out around them like a cape.

“Okay,” Matt says, voice dry and amused. “As much as I am really enjoying the view, we might want to get Allura some clothes. Keith’s jacket is really, uh, not doing much to preserve our own personal miracle’s modesty.”

Allura goes red all the way to the tops of her ears and Lance laughs and laughs and _laughs_.

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a twitter now. gods help me. [ come say hi](https://twitter.com/chronolith2)


End file.
